Obama Could Get 'Swift Boated'

April 19, 2008 -- Rick Sloan says he doesn't want to see the Democrats get "Swift Boated" again this time. So the communications director for the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers has sent a couple of dozen friends — union leaders and Democratic activists, mainly — an urgent plea to pay attention to Sen. Barack Obama's connections with the 1960s anti-war group, the Weather Underground, and other leftist thinkers.

Democrats "can't be an ostrich on this" with their heads buried in the sand, Sloan said in an interview.

He sent a copy of the memo to ABC News by e-mail.

Titled "What Is Rove Up To?," Sloan writes that Rove will seek to redefine Obama's signature slogan "Change We Can Believe In" and brand it instead as "revolutionary change, change driven by an alien ideology, change no patriotic American could stomach. And he intends to do so by channeling Sen. Joseph McCarthy."

The IAMAW endorsed Clinton last year, and Sloan is an avid Clinton supporter. The document makes no mention of Sloan's position with the union, and he told ABC News he sent it as a private citizen, not in his role as a spokesman for the union.

"Democratic operatives ought to be aware of what the Republican attack machine has been doing for two weeks," Sloan said in the interview.

He compared the timing of his memo to the time frame in 2004 when the group Swift Boat Veterans for Truth registered its Web site domain and began making plans to take down former presidential candidate John Kerry, D-Mass. "This is history repeating itself," Sloan said.

In the memo, Sloan lays out the case he believes Republicans are making and would make against Obama if he were the Democratic nominee, linking the senator to Weather Underground founders Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.

"According to Weatherman communiqués and papers compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation into a 403 page summary, Ayers and Dohrn toed the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist line. They were hardcore Communists bent on world revolution," Sloan writes.