The Note: Ayers it Out

Oct. 10, 2008— -- Until or unless evidence emerges that, on the advice of Jeremiah Wright and Michael Pfleger, Tony Rezko paid for Barack Obama to take Bill Ayers' course on how to tank an economy, it's just possible that the current (final?) line of attack by Sen. John McCain doesn't precisely match this moment in the campaign.

Maybe, of course, the McCain campaign is right. Maybe shady Chicago connections involving a candidate who's been on the national stage for 18 months will trump the economy and the stock market and the housing crisis as issues for these final three-plus weeks.

"I don't care about two washed-up old terrorists that are unrepentant about trying to destroy America. But I do care, and Americans should care, about his relationship with him and whether he's being truthful and candid about," McCain, R-Ariz., told ABC's Charlie Gibson Thursday.

"I see matters of judgment and truthfulness and ambition," Gov. Sarah Palin, R-Alaska, said on the stump Thursday.

Or maybe the answer is to tie the big storylines together. New from the McCain campaign Friday: An ad that casually drops the L-word and touches on both Ayers to the economic distress, with Democrats portrayed as anti-regulation.

The ad: "Obama's blind ambition. When convenient, he worked with terrorist Bill Ayers. When discovered, he lied. Obama. Blind ambition. Bad judgment. Congressional liberals fought for risky sub-prime loans. Congressional liberals fought against more regulation. Then, the housing market collapsed, costing you billions. In crisis, we need leadership, not bad judgment."

The RNC is putting Ayers (and others) into play, too -- with a new ad launching in Indiana and Wisconsin featuring Ayers, Rezko, and William Daley. "There's more you need to know," says the ad.

But if Team McCain is wrong (and the stock market seems to be rendering a political verdict daily on what Americans should care about, and Obama will have a block of primetime television a week before the election to weigh in like McCain can't) -- get ready for an ugly stretch.

Not just on the trail, either -- here come the internal campaign splits that are the real signs of a campaign that's losing focus amid the prospect of losing:

"Sen. John McCain has allowed a series of increasingly harsh broadsides in new campaign ads and in speeches by his wife, Cindy, and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin. But the Arizona Republican has rejected pleas from some advisers to launch attacks focusing on Sen. Obama's former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright," Monica Langley and Elizabeth Holmes report in The Wall Street Journal.

Is someone setting him or (her) self up to say told-you-so? "Sen. McCain vetoed proposals to attack the Illinois senator for his 20 years as a member of the church led by Rev. Wright, whose harsh comments about racism in America and other issues created problems for Sen. Obama during the Democratic primary contest," Langley and Holmes continue.

Even Wright-less, McCain's current strategy is working, if the intent is to play to folks in the base who are against something, anything, everything:

"What has been most striking about the last 48 hours on the campaign trail is the increasingly hostile atmosphere at Mr. McCain's rallies, where voters furiously booed any mention of Mr. Obama and lashed out at the Democrats, Wall Street and the news media," Elisabeth Bumiller and Patrick Healy write in The New York Times.

"I'm really mad!" shouted one audience member at the McCain-Palin rally Waukesha, Wis. "And what's going to surprise you, it's not the economy. It's the socialists taking over our country."

"There were shouts of 'Nobama' and 'Socialist' at the mention of the Democratic presidential nominee. There were boos, middle fingers turned up and thumbs turned down as a media caravan moved through the crowd Thursday for a midday town hall gathering featuring John McCain and Sarah Palin," Michael D. Shear and Perry Bacon Jr. write in The Washington Post.

This from Wisconsin radio host James T. Harris, a warm-up speaker at a McCain campaign event: "I am begging you, sir. I am begging you. Take it to him."

(With the anxious, angry base -- anyone else having Kerry '04 flashbacks?)

The party's frustrations, now playing daily (try to count the smears): "The unmistakable momentum behind Barack Obama's campaign, combined with worry that John McCain is not doing enough to stop it, is ratcheting up fears and frustrations among conservatives," Politico's Jonathan Martin writes. "And nowhere is this emotion on plainer display than at Republican rallies, where voters this week have shouted out insults at the mention of Obama, pleaded with McCain to get more aggressive with the Democrat and generally demonstrated the sort of visceral anger and unease that reflects a party on the precipice of panic."

"At a normal campaign rally, it's the candidate who tries to whip the crowd into a frenzy. At John McCain's town-hall Waukesha, Wis., Thursday, it was the other way around," Slate's John Dickerson writes.

Mightn't this all have worked better a few month ago? "McCain has only himself to blame for the bad timing," columnist Charles Krauthammer writes. "He should months ago have begun challenging Obama's associations, before the economic meltdown allowed the Obama campaign (and the mainstream media, which is to say the same thing) to dismiss the charges as an act of desperation by the trailing candidate."

(What does this say about the political future? "Some in the very partisan crowd even booed McCain at one point after he said, 'I believe that climate change is real; I believe that greenhouse gasses are a threat to our planet.' The crowd cheered when Palin said 'Drill, baby, drill' for oil," Abdon M. Pallasch reports in the Chicago Sun-Times.)

Obama's latest on Ayers: "I was eight years old at the time [of the bombings] and I assumed that he had been rehabilitated," he tells a Philadelphia radio host, per Politico's Ben Smith.

McCain errs on Ayers (on purpose?): "I don't care about Mr. Ayers who, on Sept. 11, 2001, said he wished he'd have bombed more," McCain told Charlie Gibson. Per ABC's Ron Claiborne: "The only problem with this account is that Ayers did not say that on Sept. 11. He said it some days earlier. It happened to appear in the New York Times on Sept. 11."

The New Republic's Michael Crowley: "If Ayers is self-evidently loathsome enough that we should doubt Obama's basic judgment, then surely McCain, once corrected on this point, won't feel the need to keep stretching the facts as a way of connecting Ayers to something more emotionally salient and politically relevant than the Vietnam War."