As Chairman of the IRI, McCain can be assumed to have been genearlly aware of and approved of the part of Khalidi’s organization’s agenda that his IRI funded so substantially. Does that mean that McCain supports all the things that Khalidi believes in? No, just that Khalidi’s organization (and by close association, Khalidi himself) is decent enough to have qualified for Republican funding for at least part of their agenda.

So why is it unreasonable to assume that Obama may have also found aspects of Khalidi’s agenda acceptable, and worth supporting verbally (though apparently not with any funding) at a social gathering?

And if other people stood up at that social gathering and said things that Obama did not agree with, that doesn’t make him responsible for their opinions.

McCain has touted his record as a maverick. He should. One of his strengths has been his willingness to step outside the ideological straightjackets of the established political order and find common ground with others to try to solve common problems. His work with liberal Democrats to enact campaign finance reform is a good example of this strengh of his. By being maverick he has broken political logjams, and the American people have benefitted.

Obama appears to have a somewhat similar streak, a certain open-mindedness that lets him listen to what someone has to say, discard the part he doesn’t agree with, yet find the common ground that allows him to work with the person to reach a common goal. He had to do this a lot when working as a community organizer in Chicago. There he had to get local polical factions that were almost incompatible with each other to work together to tackle the intractable issues he was trying to solve.

In the heat of a campaign, the willingness to recognize and work with all the players in the political game — even the players that make juicy headlines in FoxNews — becomes a liability. OK, that’s the way the game is played. But that’s a trait we need in a president, and I am glad that both McCanin and Obama appear to have it.