Should Obama not respond to attacks based on his association with Bill Ayers?

Here's the Obama response, which Shannen Coffin thinks is terrible:

It starts with: "Why is John McCain talking about the Sixties?" Well, McCain wasn't talking about anything; it was an unrelated (but supportive) group.

Ugh! How awful to set about correcting others for connecting Obama to Ayers and to begin by misstating McCain's connection to the ad.

"Why is McCain trying to link Barack Obama to radical Bill Ayers?" asks the ad? ... [T]his seems to be the first time Obama has described his seemingly close associate as a radical.

Maybe they thought we'd hear "radical Bill Ayers" as the Bill Ayers of the distant past — as distinguished from present-day Ayers, who's become a fine, upstanding, mainstream citizen. But it would be stupid to think Americans have such a subtle picture of Bill Ayers. If they did, you wouldn't need to run the ad at all. So if you're going to wade into this, you have to bring us up to speed at the same time. It's sort of like they thought they could say: If you are aware of this issue, here is our answer. If you're not, please don't start thinking about it.

The ad explains that Obama "denounced Ayers' crime." Whether that is true or not, his recent association with Ayers is not addressed. And again, Obama suggests that it is somehow relevant that the crimes were committed when he was just eight years old. As I recall, Charles Manson was committing crimes in the same time frame, but are any Presidential candidates jumping on the Manson express?

You don't get off the hook for association with a bad person by saying that you denounce whatever bad things he's done. Are we not to judge the candidate by the company he keeps? The point needs to be that Ayers has become a completely different person, one who would never commit the kind of crimes he once advocated.

Jennifer Rubin calls the ad Obama's "biggest goof yet":

He took a story largely confined to the internet, (only briefly raised in the primary) ...

Actually, Rush Limbaugh talks about this story often. Back to Rubin:

... about Obama’s connection to former terrorist Bill Ayers, put it in his own ad, and then filed a claim trying to force the third-party 527 ad that first brought up the Obama-Ayers connection off the air. In the next 24 hours thousands if not millions of voters who never heard of or didn’t understand the extent of the Obama-Ayers relationship are going to get a full education.

Here's the story about the effort to block the 527 ad:

Obama’s campaign has written the Department of Justice demanding a criminal investigation of the “American Issues Project,” the vehicle through which Dallas investor Harold Simmons is financing the advertisements. The Obama campaign — and tens of thousands of supporters — also is pressuring television networks and affiliates to reject the ads. The effort has met with some success: CNN and Fox News are not airing the attacks.