Obama's Response Ad Reflects Lessons of 2004

McCain campaign spokesman Brian Rogers called it "100 percent misleading" to blame the Republican for an ad he had nothing to do with. He said the campaign has had no discussions with Simmons about the ad, the issue or the organization. Failor has not been involved in the McCain campaign for more than a year, Rogers said.

But Rogers made no effort to distance McCain from the Ayers issue. "If he thinks his long association with an unrepentant domestic terrorist is nothing the American people should be concerned about, he's delusional or naive," Rogers said of Obama. "The guy's running for president. It's an issue."

Ayers did hold a gathering for him in 1995 when Obama first ran for the Illinois Senate, and he later contributed $200 to his reelection campaign. But Bauer said that hardly constitutes launching the political career of a University of Chicago Law School lecturer and the first African American president of the Harvard Law Review, who had just published his first memoir, "Dreams From My Father."

A Bauer letter to Deputy Assistant Attorney General John C. Keeney challenges him to make good on a promise to vigorously act in the face of "a knowing and willful attempt to evade the strictures of federal election law."

More than 93,000 pro-Obama e-mails have flooded Sinclair Broadcasting Group stations that are running the ad, many of them threatening to boycott the stations and their advertisers. Obama campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor warned that other stations that accept the ad can expect the same response.

Efforts to stop the Ayers ad have not come only from the Obama campaign. A film company in Berkeley, Calif., that made an Oscar-nominated documentary in 2004 on the Weather Underground group has issued a cease-and-desist letter to the American Issues Project, saying that it illegally appropriated copyright images from the film for the ad. Brook Dooley, an attorney for the Free History Project, said shots of Ayers speaking into a camera in an interview and the aftermath of a Weather Underground bombing were copyrighted. The group has informed about 150 stations in Ohio and Michigan of its objection, but Dooley said no decisions have been made about legal action.

Separately, a new effort by Democratic strategist Tom Matzzie, called Accountable America, is aimed at warning conservative donors of the legal thicket they may be entering by financing independent attack ads like the Ayers spot. He said his group's first target is Simmons.

Pinkston said his group and his donors are undaunted.

"The Obama campaign has raised this to front-page news, frankly, with this response ad, with these legal attacks, with their outreach to reporters," he said.