William Ayers

From John McCain's perspective, the dispiriting outcome of the last presidential debate was determined long before he and Barack Obama arrived on the Hofstra campus. It had been decided months before, in fact, largely by the ineptitude of the Republican campaign's strategists. Actually, as experienced figures in both parties now agree, "strategist" is probably too generous a term to describe the people managing McCain's campaign. (Lobbyist is generally a more accurate term for the top advisers but beside the point here.) Rick Davis, Steve Schmidt, and the rest of the McCain-Palin crew have consistently failed to move their campaign above the tactical level.  read more »

Steve Kornacki's column today pointedly recalls the nasty Republican memes of the 1992 campaign, which sought to instill doubt about Bill Clinton's patriotism because he had protested the Vietnam War. So desperate were they to retain power that employees of the first Bush administration rifled illegally through Clinton's passport files.

(That scandal concluded with an ineffectual special-counsel investigation by a highly partisan G.O.P. lawyer.) Flash forward to the affecting moment two weeks ago, when that same George H.W. Bush, now quite old and frail, showed up as an honored guest of his successor at the Clinton Global Initiative in New York.

There was real emotion in the elder Bush's voice when he talked about his friendship with Clinton, which began in earnest with their fund-raising efforts on behalf of the Katrina and tsunami victims.  read more »

New York Times executive editor Bill Keller defended last weekend's front-page story on radical William Ayers and his connection to Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Mr. Keller writes an e-mail to Politico.com's Michael Calderone:

"We've reported the Ayers relationship before, and we had it on our ‘to do’ list for a while to take a more comprehensive look... When the McCain campaign began to make it a major focal point of ads and stump speeches, we decided the time was right.”

“It didn't take any prodding... When the conversation on something controversial reaches a certain level, curious readers look to The Times to help them sort the facts from the fictions and figure out what to make of it. That's what we did.”

On Thursday, John McCain at last did away with all above-the-fray pretense and added his voice to the right-wing chorus now openly trying to portray Barack Obama as a fundamentally anti-American figure.

McCain, whose running-mate previously accused the Democratic presidential nominee of “palling around with terrorists,” sought to frame Obama’s rather tenuous connection with Bill Ayers in the most sinister terms possible.

“Senator Obama says he was just another guy in the neighborhood,” McCain said. “We know that isn’t true. We need to know the full extent of the truth because of whether Senator Obama is telling the truth to the American people or not.  read more »

It was always difficult to understand why The New York Times felt obliged to devote regular Op-Ed space to the views of William Kristol, but as of today I get it.

What Kristol provides, unlike many writers whose opinions are equally trite and detestable, is a transparent view of the Republican operative brain. Reading him, you can almost hear the ratcheting of his mind through layers of opposition research until he thinks he has found what his candidate needs. This morning he treats us to his conversation with Governor Sarah Palin, in which they try to come up with a strategy (or at least a few tactics) to distract the country from the economic disaster created by years of right-wing governance.  read more »