The McCain campaign is naked.

The news is out that the McCainiacs do not believe they can win a fair fight against Barack Obama. Their strategy: slime him. And here's how it works. This past weekend, Obama blasted McCain's health care proposal, which relies on tax credits. He called it "radical." And the McCain camp was outraged at Obama's use of the R-word.

But rather than do battle on policy grounds, the campaign issued a statement slamming Obama for having once served on a board with Bill Ayres, a former Weather Underground bomb-thrower who gave up his radical ways and became a respected education expert:

On a day when new reports have surfaced about Barack Obama's long association with a domestic terrorist, our Democratic opponent had the audacity to call John McCain's health care plan "radical." The American people know radical when they hear it, and John McCain is not the candidate in this election they should be concerned about.

It seems that whenever Obama criticizes McCain's policies, McCain's response will be, "Bill Ayres, Bill Ayres, Bill Ayres." Or, I suppose, it might shift to "Jeremiah Wright, Jeremiah Wright, Jeremiah Wright." I wonder how McCain is going to follow this strategy in the debate on Tuesday night. His running mate, Sarah Palin, looked quasi-foolish trying to change the subject so many times during her face-off with Joe Biden. If McCain is asked about the fact that Obama's tax proposal offers more tax cuts to the bottom 99 percent of taxpayers than his own, will he say, "That's just the sort of plan that a pal of Bill Ayres would propose. And let me tell you about Bill Ayres...."?

Meanwhile, let's pretend that reality matters. McCain's health care proposal is "radical." Or so suggests Jane Bryant Quinn, the not-at-all-radical economics writer for Newsweek. She writes: