With job losses continuing to be a major problem in America, John McCain would rather not focus on the economy. Nope....You can always count on the politics of personal destruction from Republicans and the news coming out is that John McCain will amp up these attacks that have little to do with the issues and all to do with desperation.
Sen. John McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations, several top Republicans said.
With just a month to go until Election Day, McCain's team has decided that its emphasis on the senator's biography as a war hero, experienced lawmaker and straight-talking maverick is insufficient to close a growing gap with Obama. The Arizonan's campaign is also eager to move the conversation away from the economy, an issue that strongly favors Obama and has helped him to a lead in many recent polls.
"We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here," said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity.
The corporate media has already started the ball rollling, it seems. NYT ran a 2100 word piece on Obama's "associations" but couldn't seem to find anything to say. Steve Benen found the real dirt in the Times article:
At a tumultuous meeting of anti-Vietnam War militants at the Chicago Coliseum in 1969, Bill Ayers helped found the radical Weathermen, launching a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and United States Capitol.
Twenty-six years later, at a lunchtime meeting about school reform in a Chicago skyscraper, Barack Obama met Mr. Ayers, by then an education professor. Their paths have crossed sporadically since then, at a coffee Mr. Ayers hosted for Mr. Obama's first run for office, on the schools project and a charitable board, and in casual encounters as Hyde Park neighbors. [...]
[T]he two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers, whom he has called "somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8."
This seems to have started with a Wall Street Journal piece by Stanley Kurtz with the scary headline "Obama and Ayers Pushed Radicalism On Schools" (and if you know about Kurtz, you know that he's a reliably far right hack, but then, this is the WSJ editorial page) that had the right-wingers drooling. The only problem, as Jason Zengerle points out, is that there's no there there:
So Kurtz spends days wading through 70 linear feet of material, suffers lord knows how many paper cuts, and the best he can come up with is that Ayers was part of a five-person "working group" that signed off on Obama joining CAC's board? That's pretty weak.
The Obama campaign seems to be ready for this one. From Politico:
His campaign is going up Monday on national cable stations with a scathing ad saying: “Three quarters of a million jobs lost this year. Our financial system in turmoil. And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy. No wonder his campaign wants to change the subject.
“Turn the page on the financial crisis by launching dishonorable, dishonest ‘assaults’ against Barack Obama. Struggling families can't turn the page on this economy, and we can't afford another president who is this out of touch.”
I think Scott Lemieux summed it up nicely:
Still I'm outraged that Obama isn't holding daily press conferences with Treason-In-Defense-Of-Slavery Yankee to address this pressing issue! The fact that he isn't is the precise equivalent of Sarah Palin's unwillingness to answer follow-up questions about her policy positions!
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