WASHINGTON: With less than four weeks to election day, the 2008 presidential campaign between Sens. John McCain and Barack Obama has become ugly and may get uglier.
After Obama was pummeled over the weekend for his alleged ties to a former radical, a top Obama aide accused McCain yesterday of waging a “dishonest, despicable smear campaign.”
With Obama continuing to consolidate his lead in the polls, McCain is continuing his aggressive advertising attack on the Illinois senator and hoping for a great performance in today’s town-hall-style debate in Nashville, Tenn.
McCain’s goal is to shift attention away from America’s economic crisis and again raise questions about the Democrat’s readiness to lead as well as his associations in the past.
Keeping the focus off the economy is going to be hard. Wall Street tumbled yesterday, joining a sell-off around the world as fears grew that the financial crisis will cascade through economies globally despite bailout efforts by the US and other governments.
McCain’s opening rounds of attack came over the weekend when his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin, hit Obama for “palling around with terrorists” because of a past association with William Ayers, a Chicago education professor. In the 1960s, when Obama was a child, Ayers was a member of the Weather Underground, which claimed responsibility for several bombing attacks.
The Obama camp called the comment “desperate, false, and offensive,” and it noted that the two men did know each other but that Obama has always condemned Ayers’s “detestable acts.”
Even John McCain’s brother, Joe, has jumped into the political fray. Speaking at an event in support of his brother, he called two Democratic-leaning areas in Northern Virginia “Communist country.”
Virginia has long been a Republican stronghold in presidential elections, but Obama is running even or ahead of McCain in recent state polls.
“This was Joe McCain’s unsuccessful attempt at humor,” said a McCain campaign spokeswoman, Gail Gitcho.
“Obama has to keep the pressure on linking McCain to Bush on the economy, because that’s a twofer: It’s what’s driving his current lead and tipping the tossup states into his column,” said Larry Sabato, director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va. “McCain has a much tougher job: He has to try to find a way to change the direction of the election in the remaining two debates. That’s very hard to do with words when the daily headlines scream ‘Economic Disaster’.”
The Obama campaign has also gone on the offensive. On Sunday, it released an ad that accused McCain of being “erratic in a crisis” and “out of touch” by trying to “turn a page” on the economic crisis. It also called McCain’s attacks on Obama’s past associations “dishonorable, dishonest assaults.”
Obama told CNN yesterday: “The American people deserve better. Now they’re trying to use this as guilt by association. And they’ve explicitly stated that what they want to do is change the topic because they don’t want to talk about the economy.”
The story of Obama’s interaction with Ayers is drenched in irony, since it is basically a tale of Obama being co-opted into Chicago’s civic establishment.
In 1995, Obama, then a young lawyer with political ambitions but as yet no office, was recruited to chair the board of a school reform organization funded and established by a wealthy foundation.
It was then that Obama met Ayers, who already was a board member and a figure in Chicago’s education-policy elite. Mayor Richard Daley told reporters he respected Ayers and consulted with him on education issues for years.
Obama’s camp has had it with these assaults. After months of avoiding references to the decades-old “Keating Five” scandal that nearly derailed John McCain’s political career, Obama’s campaign is highlighting the Republican presidential nominee’s ties to Charles Keating, an Arizona businessman who went to prison during the aftermath of the savings and loan crisis of the 1980s.
The campaign has released a new 13-minute “documentary” about the scandal, and sending a message to supporters that ties McCain to the federal bailout that followed.
McCain was one of five senators, dubbed the “Keating Five,” who met with regulators on behalf of Charles Keating, the owner of Lincoln Savings and Loan.
The Senate Ethics Committee investigated and cleared McCain in 1991, but said that he showed poor judgment in his efforts for Keating, who had been a major contributor to his campaign. McCain later turned over $112,000 in campaign contributions from Keating to the US Treasury.
The Obama camp may also focus on another friend of McCain, -- Sen. Phil Gramm, who as chairman of the Senate Banking Committee during the Clinton Administration, consistently under funded the Securities and Exchange Commission and kept it from stopping accounting firms from auditing corporations with which they had conflicts of interest.
In 2000, he slipped into a spending bill a provision which prohibited any governmental regulation of credit default swaps.
As the housing bubble ballooned, the face value of those swaps rose to a tidy $62 trillion. And as the housing bubble burst, those swaps became a massive pile of worthless paper, because no government agency had required the banks to set aside money to back them up.
Gramm and McCain have an enduring political and economic alliance. McCain chaired Gramm’s short-lived presidential campaign in 1996; Gramm is co-chair of McCain’s current effort. McCain has not repudiated reports that Gramm is on the shortlist to become Treasury secretary if McCain is elected, even after Gramm labeled America “a nation of whiners.”
As Obama and McCain prepare for Tuesday’s debate, Darrell West, at the Brookings Institution in Washington cautions that McCain has to find a way to shift the debate toward foreign policy and away from the economy, which remains on most voters’ minds as the markets struggle throughout the world. “As long as the debate focuses on the domestic economy, he’s playing on Obama’s home court.”
