What is a candidate to do when his poll numbers are rapidly declining, when red states are shifting to blue, when the economy--his Achilles heel--continues to tank?

Why change the subject, of course.  It's called slight-of-hand.  Where the eye is misdirected away from the real action to the fake.

Thus, Sarah Palin this weekend "took off the gloves" by making overblown claims aimed at swift-boating Obama's momentum.  Citing a New York Times article, she said, "Our opponent though, is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

Trouble is, the article she cited found only the thinnest of connections between former Weather Underground radical William Ayers and Barack Obama.  They sat on a few boards together having to do with education--Ayers's area of expertise as a professor of education at the University of Illinios.  Ayers also hosted one of several coffees in support of Obama's early political career.  Doesn't sound like palling around to me.

What does sound like palling around is going to the Bahamas on someone else's dime, sharing birthday parties and accepting over $100,000 in personal and business campaign contributions.  Something Palin's running mate, McCain, did with Charles Keating. 

After rebutting the claim, Obama's campaign went through the door opened by McCain's attack and released a counter-punch video reminding voters of McCain's very close association Charles Keating.  Keating, you may recall, was convicted of fraud, racketeering and conspiracy in the Lincoln Savings and Loan failure that touched of a series of S&L failures in the 80's.

There are three problems with this attack strategy for McCain:

1.  He opened the door to character attacks...and he's much more vulnerable on this front than Obama is.  Most thinking voters will draw a distinction between McCain's intimate association with a man convicted of corporate corruption and Obama's tangential association with a man who committed illegal acts when Obama was eight years old.

2.  The S&L meltdown of the 80's resulted from corporate greed and government deregulation.  Sound familiar?  So while Obama supporters can cry fowl over trumped up connections between he and Ayers, McCain will have a harder time saying that his connection to Charles Keating is irrelevant in today's economic environment.  By trying to change the topic, they just gave Obama more to talk about on topic.

3.  Palin's terrorist comment is a transparent attempt to draw on the early fears that Rush Limbaugh and Republican pundits spread by referring to Obama using his middle name, Hussein.  Any time the Republicans can say Obama and terrorist in the same sentence, they see it as a win.

Why?  Because they don't believe the American electorate is smart enough to see beyond the smears to the real issues.  I think in this political environment, they're wrong.

And, in an odd way, today's further bloodletting on Wall Street helps Obama.  Nothing will make McCain/Palin seem more out of touch than blathering on about a 60's radical while America's financial markets tank.

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