During the Democratic primaries, I wrote a column about how easy it is for any candidate to tar and feather another about his associations with less than acceptable figures.

Sen. Hillary Clinton tried to blast Sen. Barack Obama for unsolicited comments made by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, and folks such as Fox News' Sean Hannity were happy to run with it, saying it was evidence that the junior senator from Illinois was unfit to be president.

But critics such as Hannity never bothered to raise the issue of former Republican vice presidential candidate Jack Kemp praising Farrakhan for his focus on self-help. Also, nearly everyone in the media was afraid to bring up the fact that Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell had high praise for Farrakhan when Rendell was mayor of Philadelphia.

But blasting one person's associations can come back to bite you.

We now see Gov. Sarah Palin and the McCain campaign trying to stir the pot by invoking William Ayers, who was a major figure in the Weather Underground, a group that bombed the Pentagon and committed other unspeakable acts of terrorism against its own country.

Palin has been hammering home the point on the campaign trail that Obama and Ayers were friends, "palling around" the Windy City, even though the Weather Underground committed those crimes when Obama was just a child. And never mind the fact that Ayers and Obama were involved in a multimillion-dollar education grant that was funded by a right-wing Republican, media magnate Walter Annenberg. Do you hear any of them castigating this late Republican pillar?

The McCain camp, along with its right-wing media comrades, want to convince you that Obama should not have decided to serve with Ayers, who was named Citizen of the Year in Chicago in 1987 for his education work and who is a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Now, if someone was seen as an acceptable figure by business, political and education figures, many of whom support both Democrats and Republicans, should Obama be faulted for sitting on a board with the guy?

Let's use that same logic and apply it to McCain.

Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., a Democrat from Chicago who serves as a national co-chairman for the Obama campaign, told me on the "Tom Joyner Morning Show" that if we are to use the association tag as evidence of a candidate being unfit for the presidency, what about McCain serving and working alongside people with virulent bigoted pasts, such as former Sens. Jesse Helms and Strom Thurmond and current Sen. Robert Byrd?

Do we have evidence that those individuals committed specific acts against African-Americans during Jim Crow? No. But we do know that their hateful words and willingness to uphold laws that were absolutely anti-American did not represent the best of this nation.

Thurmond ran for president as a Dixiecrat in 1948 with a platform of maintaining segregation. Based on Helms' policies, he didn't see blacks as full Americans.

Bombing the Pentagon is horrible and indefensible. But declaring yourself a patriot while you speak such hateful and venomous words against your own countrymen who just happen to be black and then trying to oppress them is just as indefensible.

So did McCain work with them? Did he not speak with them? Should McCain have declared that he would not work alongside those men because of their pasts? Should the self-described maverick who believes in integrity and character have taken the honorable stance of resigning from the Senate to protest those hateful characters serving in the U.S. Senate?

No. And that is why this association argument is so weak and impotent.

For goodness' sake, Byrd was once a member of the Ku Klux Klan, a domestic terrorist organization!

Now, if Ayers were involved in those despicable acts today — or Byrd and his late Senate colleagues — then it is fair game.

But no candidate should have to be held responsible for the actions of someone else that took place years ago.

I fundamentally believe that this is nothing but a smoke screen and an effort to ignore the real issues we face. People should not care about any of this when they are losing their jobs and having their homes foreclosed and finding themselves unable to afford to send their kids to college and to get access to health care.

What I find to be even more deplorable is that McCain's advisers are saying they want to turn the page to anything but issue No. 1 — the economy.

If that kind of talk is coming from the camp of a guy who wants to be president, then that is something to be afraid of — not a candidate's association with Ayers or Thurmond, Helms and Byrd.

Roland S. Martin is an award-winning CNN contributor and the author of "Listening to the Spirit Within: 50 Perspectives on Faith." Please visit his Web site at www.RolandSMartin.com. To find out more about Roland S. Martin and read his past columns, visit the Creators Syndicate Web page at www.creators.com.

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