The lefty bloggers are, as Jonah Goldberg predicted, apoplectic, clutching their skulls with rage over last night’s debate.

That’s always enjoyable. What’s irksome, though, is the Left’s insistence that anything the Left doesn’t want to talk about is not an “issue.” It’s an issue if the voters care about it, and to dismiss their concerns while redefining “issues” as “what the Left wants to talk about” seems to me like a good example of what Jonah calls “base-stealing.”

Why isn’t Mr. Obama’s longtime association with the Rev. Wright and various and sundry other radicals an “issue”? It’s certainly an issue to many, many Americans, who understand that we elect men, not abstract aggregations of policy positions, to office, and that a man’s history is often a good indicator of what he values and of how he will comport himself (cf. “Clinton, William J.”) If Mr. Obama really believes that people in Elkhart, Kansas, “cling to” church, guns, and (alleged) racism–which in Mr. Obama’s mind seem to form a single category–out of frustration that their bank accounts are not as fat as the Obamas’ are, that is an entirely legitimate concern. If we lined up Mr. Obama’s and Mrs. Clinton’s collection of radical associates, we’d have a representative sample of people who have done tremendous damage to our country in the past four or five decades. If that isn’t an issue, what is? To dismiss these issues like they’re high-school clique politics is a dishonest dodge for avoiding discussions that the Left is going to find uncomfortable.