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- Let the smears begin. John McCain and Sarah Palin have chosen, unsurprisingly, to go hard negative against Barack Obama by playing up the Democrat's "otherness." And even though McCain had previously ordered his campaign to not bring up Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Palin apparently didn't get the memo, bringing up the association in Florida today. For his part, McCain has begun to put the question directly to voters: Who is the real Barack Obama?
- Anticipating McCain's efforts to drag him into the mud, Barack Obama has begun playing up McCain's involvement with the Keating Five during the savings and loan scandal, setting up a website devoted to the subject. Meanwhile, others have asked, not unreasonably, why not bring up McCain's long association with unrepentant and remorseless criminal thug G. Gordon Liddy? Seems only fair to me.
- On Saturday The New York Times indulged the right-wing conspiracy theorists at The Corner by looking into Obama's relationship to '60's bomber Bill Ayers. Unsurprisingly, The Times found very little to implicate the two, leading Stanley Kurtz to conclude that a "whitewash" was at hand. This is, incidentally, the hip new line among professional conservatives: the public is ignorant of Obama's radicalism because the liberal media is conspiring to hide this fact from them.
- A front-page story in The Washington Post chronicles how newly registered voters are overwhelmingly Democratic, and Walter Shapiro reports on huge gap in the ground game between the Obama and McCain campaigns in Wisconsin. Meanwhile, Nate Silver looks at early voting in Georgia and and concludes "Barack Obama is winning Georgia right now" based on African-American turnout, which bodes well for him in Virginia and North Carolina.
- The RNC is filing an FEC complaint against the Obama campaign for allegedly taking foreign donations, based on a Newsweek report documenting certain donors making multiple small donations using fake names. Of course, as Tim points out, McCain has already returned a tidy sum in foreign contributions.
- Campaigning in California, Sarah Palin made reference to "our neighboring country of Afghanistan," while Joe McCain, John's brother, wryly observed that "I've lived here [Virginia] for at least 10 years and before that about every third duty I was in either Arlington or Alexandria, up in communist country." Why is everyone involved with the McCain campaign -- including the candidate -- so geographically challenged?
- The next time you're lounging in the teak-lined study of your coastal retreat, enjoying a fine cognac and chortling over the rubes in flyover country, make sure you read Jonathan Raban's devastating expose in The London Review of Books of how Sarah Palin's lack of interest in city planning or culture turned Wasilla, AK, into a wasteland of urban sprawl and soulless big box stores.
- We all know Republicans are bracing for a bloodbath come November 4. But it's gotten so bad that even Karl Rove projects a potential landslide for Obama that could ripple downballot.
--Mori Dinauer
