Sarah Palin calls Barack Obama a socialist. John McCain equates Obama's appearance at a dinner for a Palestinian scholar with hanging out with neo-Nazis. At McCain-Palin campaign rallies, members of the audience call Obama a communist, a Muslim and a terrorist. Is there no doubt that the GOP ticket has the edge on extremism? Do you hear Obama referring to McCain as a war-monger? Do his supporters scream out "fascist" when Obama mentions his opponents?

And the McCain-Palin attacks are particularly hypocritical. McCain is board chair for the International Republican Institute, and the IRI gave nearly $500,000 to a group co-founded by the abovementioned Palestinian scholar, Khalid Rashidi. And Palin spreads the wealth of Alaska by sharing with every state citizen a slice of the state's oil revenue.

But for McCain and Palin, facts--as Ronald Reagan once said--are stupid things.

This has been a rough and tough campaign, but the dirtiest plays have come from the McCain side. On MSNBC this week [correction: it was CNN], McCain aide Michael Goldfarb pointed to Obama's association with Rashidi to claim Obama pals around with anti-Semites. (Rashidi is no anti-Semite.) This was a low moment of the campaign, but because it came late in the game, amid so much last-week hurly-burly, it received not much attention. But it was a good indicator of the McCain strategy: throw mud, see what sticks.

The McCain camp has shown a disregard for facts that extends beyond the S.O.P. of political campaigns. It has tried to deligitimize Obama and his supporters. Palin notes that only certain parts of the country contain "real Americans." A top McCain aide dismissed northern Virginia--where Obama is strong--as not being "real" Virginia.

McCain and his gang have tried to whip up fear and division and exploit both. If he gets whipped on Tuesday, it will be bad news for others who would practice the politics of hate.

I've listened to Sarah Palin several times in the past few days. (It's my job--what I get the big bucks to do.) And as she whips up the crowds that come to her rallies, her biggest argument against Barack Obama is that he WILL RAISE YOUR TAXES. Did you get that? Oh, you missed the nuance. HE WILL RAISE YOUR TAXES. And her case is built on two facts. But they are not facts--or not full facts. And though these attacks have been debunked repeatedly by mainstream media factcheckers, Palin and John McCain keep using them. Call me naive, but I still find it surprising that they believe they can get away with such serial misrepresenting (or lying). So for the last time--I hope--let's look at these two claims.

Claim 1: Obama voted to raise taxes on people making as less as $42,000.

Here's how Factcheck.org evaluated that charge:

So Sarah Palin is a "brainiac." That's what Elaine Lafferty proclaims. And the reason her proclamation is the least bit interesting is that Lafferty is a Democrat and the former editor-in-chief of Ms. magazine, the feminist journal. In a piece she posted yesterday, she notes she has "worked as a consultant with the McCain campaign since shortly after Palin's nomination" and has traveled with Palin on her "cramped" campaign plane.

I have no idea how a onetime feminist activist, a former journalist, and a present Democrat came to be working for an antiabortion, media-blasting Republican vice presidential candidate. But Lafferty wants us to know that Palin possesses "a mind that is thoughtful, curious, with a discernible pattern of associative thinking and insight. Palin asks questions, and probes linkages and logic that bring to mind a quirky law professor I once had."

This is troubling. Why? Because I had assumed that some of the idiotic and false statements Palin had made on the campaign trail were due to a certain amount of ignorance on her part. If she is as smart as Lafferty says, then she would be more dangerous if elected. No intelligent person would say some of the following things, unless she was purposefully trying to fool people.

* To boost her foreign policy cred, Palin said "you can actually see Russia from land here in Alaska," and she maintained that she had experience dealing with trade delegations, presumably those from Russia. But according to her calendars, she never met with a Russian official and rarely met with any foreign officials to discuss trade or anything else.

* Palin repeatedly said she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere--even though many news organizations reported she had been a supporter of the project before Congress soured on the project. Why would an intelligent person keep repeating the same mistake?

* Palin said Barack Obama has been "palling around with terrorists"--using the present tense and the plural to hype Obama's past casual association with just one ex-radical. Her intelligence certainly did not motivate her to be precise.

I was at Sarah Palin's rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia, on Monday. It was a standard appearance--and a standard crowd. "Keep America Jesusful," read one sign held by one of the several thousand Palin fans who had assembled at a community park under very dark clouds. As Palin hit the stage, the P.A. blasted Dolly Parton's working-women anthem, "9 to 5." The portion playing: "Want to move ahead/But the boss won't seem to let me/I swear sometimes that man is out to get me." It seemed rather appropriate, given the recent stories that Palin was purportedly upset with how the McCain staffers have over- or mishandled her.

In her remarks, Palin broke no new ground. She did defend the negative tactics of the McCain-Palin campaign, saying it was "not negative to call someone out....on their associations." That was clearly a reference to the Bill Ayers assault--and a reference to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright. But then Palin did not call Barack Obama out on his associations with either Ayers or Wright. Perhaps that's just for robo-calls. And as she blasted Obama's tax policies--"now is not the time to experiment with socialism," she exclaimed--audience members shouted out, "Marxist," "Communist," and "Robin Hood." She referred to the Democratic presidential nominee as "Barack the wealth spreader."

But this is what was odd: the dominant sign in the crowd was a blue campaign placard with the McCain-Palin effort's motto: "Country First." But the sign did not have McCain's name on it. Nor Palin's. Nor the campaign's website. Instead, underneath the motto, it said "GOP.com." Is the McCain-Palin campaign too poor to print up "Country First" signs promoting the campaign itself? Is the Republican Party trying to sell a motto and itself instead of its candidate? (On Tuesday morning, the home page at GOP.com barely mentioned John McCain.)

I don't know. But other reporters also thought the candidate-less "Country First" sign, which had been handed out to hundreds of attendees, was curious. It does seem that at the end of the campaign, the GOP is trying to beat Obama not with its own candidate but with its usual shibboleths: taxes are bad, government is bad, liberals are socialists, and Democrats are weak and unpatriotic. Call it a Slogans First strategy.

From the Rats Fleeing a Sinking Ship Department, here are two items.

The AP reports:

Sen. Jon Kyl of Arizona expressed some doubt to a newspaper reporter that his seatmate, John McCain, will be elected president.

Following an interview last week with the Arizona Daily Star editorial board, Kyl wondered if McCain would join Republican Barry Goldwater and Democrats Mo Udall and Bruce Babbitt as Arizonans who tried and failed to win the White House.

"Unfortunately, I think John McCain might be added to that long list of Arizonans who ran for president but were never elected," Kyl told the Star. "Maybe, we'll be able to say Arizona's the only state where your child can't grow up to be president. Let's hope that doesn't happen."

And from the Financial Times:

If George W. Bush this week established a U.S. diplomatic presence in Tehran, would that help John McCain or Barack Obama? The answer is obvious: though doing so would not be the same as conducting high-level negotiations with Iran's top leaders without preconditions, it sure would undermine McCain's attack on Obama for having agreed to hold discussions with Iranian leaders and other thuggish heads of state. Which is presumably why Bush isn't going to do this until after the election. From McClatchy Newspapers:

The Bush administration will announce in mid-November, after the presidential election, that it intends to establish the first U.S. diplomatic presence in Iran since the 1979-81 hostage crisis, according to senior Bush administration officials. The proposal for an "interests section," which falls short of a full U.S. Embassy, has been conveyed in private diplomatic messages to Tehran, and a search is under way to choose the American diplomat who'd head the post, the officials said.

They spoke on condition of anonymity because the step hasn't been announced and discussions of it have been limited to a small circle of government officials.

How nice of Bush to hold back on this to help McCain--even as McCain each day is trying to distance himself further from Bush.

From an August 15, 1988 front-page story in the "Style" section of The Washington Post on the GOP convention:

McCain, who has been mentioned here and there as a vice presidential possibility, has been a strong Bush supporter -- though there have been some glitches. Last June he made forays to Nashville and Miami, just before Michael Dukakis was due to speak in those cities, to raise questions before the media, which he said they then asked the Democratic candidate, such as, "If a drug dealer kills a law enforcement agent, shouldn't that drug dealer be liable to the death penalty?"

This was widely perceived as a negative tactic, and the Dukakis campaign immediately launched a counterattack in the Arizona press, asking why McCain was out campaigning for Bush instead of doing his job in Washington. As a result, McCain told the Bush campaign that "I preferred the surrogate kind of stuff that's positive. Let's face it, I'm not one who's comfortable with the attack role."

No comment.

This is rich. Today, while campaigning in Florida, John McCain declared that Barack will say "anything to get elected."

I read this as a cry for help. A quick run-down of McCain self-contradictions and say-anything moments:

* McCain initially opposed the George W. Bush tax cuts, claiming they gave too much to the rich. Now, when Obama wants to reverse those tax cuts, the McCain campaign brands it socialism.

* McCain attacked robocall attacks in 2000. Now he perpetuates them.

* McCain said he doesn't care about a "washed-up terrorist"--meaning Bill Ayers--but he still makes Obama's past association with Ayers a key part of is campaign. (See the robocalls.) And Sarah Palin accused Obama of palling around with terrorists, using the plural form of the word. Putting Ayers aside, name another one.

* In an interview NBC is promoting today, McCain dismisses the elites who hang out at Georgetown cocktail parties. McCain has been a participant in many such gatherings over his decades in Washington.

* McCain stood by a campaign ad saying that Barack Obama pushed for teaching "comprehensive sex education" to kindergartners Obama did not.

* The McCain campaign claimed that Obama's use of the old lipstick-on-a-pig cliche was a direct, misogynistic swipe at Palin. It was not.

* McCain has insisted that Obama, if elected, would push everyone into a government-run health care system. That ain't true.

* McCain said he would skip the first debate unless a Wall Street bailout deal was reached. You know how that turned out.

You know that old joke: there are two types of people in the world--those who divide the world into two types of people, and those who don't. Well, in previous weeks, I've been dividing Republicans and conservatives I know between two types: those willing to acknowledge (even if only privately) that Sarah Palin was not--shall we say--the best pick John McCain could have made, and those who claim she is indeed qualified and will be a fine veep and a capable (should it come to that) president. My rough survey of the Rs and conservatives I have encountered on the street, at political events, and in green rooms at TV studios is that about one half to two-thirds will admit they believe is that Palin is either a misguided error on McCain's part that can be overcome or an act of blatant misjudgment that has led to a freakin' disaster.

When McCain announced her selection it did seem possible the choice would help his campaign. And his campaign did not appear to mind all the attention she drew. But in my recollection, I cannot recall a veep candidate who has so dominated the post-convention story of the election. Not even Dan Quayle. And in Palin's case, the news keeps getting worse. A new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll finds that 55 percent of registered voters believe she's not qualified to serve as president. That's up 5 percent from its last poll--suggesting that the more people see of Palin the less they are impressed. And her negative approval rating for the first time exceeds her positive approval rating, 47 percent versus 38 percent. Moreover, voters told these pollsters that McCain's selection of Palin was their top concern about McCain's candidacy.

The latest neocon to turn tail on John McCain is Kenneth Adelman, a former foreign policy official in the Reagan administration. Adelman is most famous--or infamous--for having predicted in February 2002, 13 months before the invasion of Iraq, that "demolishing Hussein's military power and liberating Iraq would be a cakewalk." Explaining his decision to vote for Obama, Adelman recently told The New Yorker:

"When the economic crisis broke, I found John McCain bouncing all over the place. In those first few crisis days, he was impetuous, inconsistent, and imprudent; ending up just plain weird. Having worked with Ronald Reagan for seven years, and been with him in his critical three summits with Gorbachev, I've concluded that that's no way a president can act under pressure."

And he said of the Sarah Palin pick:

"That decision showed appalling lack of judgment. Not only is Sarah Palin not close to being acceptable in high office -- I would not have hired her for even a mid-level post in the arms-control agency. But that selection contradicted McCain's main two, and best two, themes for his campaign -- Country First, and experience counts. Neither can he credibly claim, post-Palin pick."

He sounds so reasonable, right? But I remember the days when Adelman sounded more like the mad McCainiacs I recently encountered at a McCain rally. In fact, I once wrote about Adelman's use of extremist rhetoric, and that kept him from obtaining a spot on the board of a prominent Washington advocacy group.

From a Nation magazine column (not on-line) I penned in 1988:

Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama is a big deal--but it ought to be difficult for Obama-backers to raise a full-throated cheer for it. Obama's chief selling point at the start of the campaign was that he had been right on the Iraq war. Powell, of course, was not only wrong; he had lent his prestige to the invasion, fronting for the Bush White House on the phony WMD case. And while some may view Powell's Obama endorsement as a stab at rehabilitation, Powell has never fully come to public terms with his role in the Iraq WMD scandal.

On Meet the Press, Tom Brokaw gently approached the matter:

BROKAW: I want to ask you about your own role in the decision to go to war in Iraq. Barack Obama has been critical of your appearance before the United Nations at that time. Bob Woodward has a new book out called "The War Within," and here's what he had to say about Colin Powell and his place in the administration: "Powell didn't think Iraq was a necessary war, and yet he had gone along in a hundred ways, large and small. He had resisted at times but had succumbed to the momentum and his own sense of deference -- even obedience -- to the president. Perhaps more than anyone else in the administration, Powell had been the `closer' for the president's case on war." ...What's the lesson in all of that for a former -- for a new secretary of state or for a new national security adviser, based on your own experience?

POWELL: Well, let's start at the beginning. I said to the president in 2002, we should try to solve this diplomatically and avoid war. The president accepted that recommendation. We took it to the U.N. But the president, by the end of 2002, believed that the U.N. was not going to solve the problem, and he made a decision that we had to prepare for military action.I fully supported that. And I have never said anything to suggest I did not support going to war. I thought the evidence was there. And it is not just my closing of the whole deal with my U.N. speech. I know the importance of that speech, and I regret a lot of the information that the intelligence community provided us was wrong. But three months before my speech, with a heavy majority, the United States Congress expressed its support to use military force if it was necessary. And so, we went in and used military force.

My unhappiness was that we didn't do it right. It was easy to get to Baghdad, but then we forgot that there was a lot more that had to be done. And we didn't have enough force to impose our will in the country or to deal with the insurgency when it broke out, and that I regret....

BROKAW: Removing the weapons of mass destruction from the equation, because we now know that they did not exist, was it then a war of necessity or just a war of choice?

POWELL: Without the weapons of mass destruction present, as conveyed to us by the intelligence community in the most powerful way, I don't think there would have been a war. It was the reason we took it to the public. It was the reason we took it to the American people, to the Congress, who supported it on that basis, and it's the presentation I made to the United Nations. Without those weapons of mass destruction then, Iraq did not present to the world the kind of threat that it did if it had weapons of mass destruction.

That last sentence is a syllogism. Of course, without WMDs, Iraq was not the threat it would have been had it possessed WMDs. The point was that it did not possess WMDs. And as Michael Isikoff and I showed in our book, Hubris: The Inside Story of Spin, Scandal, and the Selling of the Iraq War, the Bush administration purposefully exaggerated the error-ridden WMD case that was in itself based on faulty and incomplete evidence. But Powell dumps all the blame here on the intel gang for screwing up the intelligence. That's too convenient a dodge. Here's a case in point: the Bush White House claimed that aluminum tubes obtained by Saddam Hussein could only be used for nuclear centrifuges. Yet the nuclear scientists within the intelligence community with the most expertise on the subject disputed this. That did not stop Dick Cheney and Condi Rice from making claims on this matter that were utterly false--claims that analysts at Powell's Department of State would have known were false.

It's official: John McCain has exhumed the body of Lee Atwater and breathed life into it.

Atwater was Karl Rove before Rove was Rove. (Actually, he was a mentor for Rove.) As the GOP's top strategist in the 1980s, Atwater--accused often of relying on unethical and dirty tricks--perfected the mean and nasty politics of resentment and, thus, helped elect George H.W. Bush president.

One of McCain's latest ads would make Atwater proud. The main line of the ad, which features Joe the Plumber, is this:

Obama raises taxes on seniors, hard working families to give "welfare" to those who pay none.

At Wednesday night's debate, McCain accused Obama of engaging in class warfare. But this is real, diehard class warfare, with McCain trying to persuade middle-income Americans that Obama will take money away from them to dole out to those on welfare. You can do the racial math yourself.

Here's my take on the final McCain-Obama duel, first posted at MotherJones.com....

A political campaign can be like a rock slide. At some point, it's just going to continue in the direction it's heading--and not much can stop it. After the final debate between Senator Barack Obama and Senator John McCain, it may well be that the 2008 presidential contest has reached not the tipping point, but that rock slide point. This is not a prediction of a pro-Obama avalanche on November 4--though that's a possibility. It's merely an observation that the campaign may be done in the sense that there are no major inputs to come (barring a bolt-from-the-blue event) that will affect the final tally. Polls will show that there are still some undecided voters out there. (Who are these people?) But whatever's going to determine this election--economic concerns, a desire for change, racism, you name it--is probably already in place, and the candidates may not be able to alter this, at least not in a proactive manner. Certainly, at any time, either can turn the race upside down by saying or doing something particularly dopey.

Neither got dopey on Wednesday night. McCain even had his best (or his least unsuccessful) debate performance, but it was no--damn, I hate this cliché--game changer. McCain was more aggressive than in the previous face-offs, and he finally dared to challenge Barack Obama directly on the--drum roll, please--Bill Ayers Question. But there was this: viewers watching McCain's reaction shots during the evening could have easily wondered if the Republican presidential nominee would make it to the finish without his head exploding, for he seemed to be in the midst of an exercise in anger control.

Prior to the debate, there was much chatter about whether McCain would play the Ayers card. Judging from video of his recent rallies, it appeared that his base was demanding blood on this front. But polls indicated that these sorts of attacks have been hurting McCain with in-the-middle voters. So he faced a tough decision: ignore Ayers and upset the diehards or accuse Obama of being a pal of a domestic terrorist and alienate the indies.

McCain and his strategists came up with a hybrid approach: take a shot on the Ayers front and combine it with a traditional political assault. "I don't care about an old washed-up terrorist," McCain huffed, but then he went on to say, "we need to know the full extent of that relationship." Huh? If you don't care about Ayers, why do you care about the relationship? And why repeat the false claim that Obama launched his first political campaign within Ayer's living room?

This was essentially McCain's love letter to the GOP base. ("Now get off my case, okay?") More important, he attached it to his true attack of the night: Obama will raise your taxes. After quickly running through his Ayers index cards, McCain noted, "My campaign is about getting this economy back on track...I'm not going to raise taxes the way Senator Obama wants to raise taxes." In what was probably the last big moment of the campaign before Election Day, McCain offered this meta-argument: Obama is a liberal tax-and-spend Democrat, and I'm a conservative. (He left off the Republican part.)

Repeatedly, McCain accused Obama of wanting to throw money at problems and of yearning to raise taxes. When Obama maintained he would give tax breaks to the bottom 95 percent--and more tax relief than McCain would to this large slice of the American public--McCain replied: hey, this guy wants to raise taxes. And, by the way, he wants to spend your money.

Remember when Bill Clinton in 1996 pronounced "the era of big government is over"? Liberals were incensed that a Democratic president would bolstered Conservative Talking Point No. 1 and would accept the fundamental tenet of Reaganism.

Well, it turned out Clinton was sure wrong about that. Today, Big Government is on the march, with a Republican administration spending hundreds of billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street and to partially nationalize banks. So while we wait for the final presidential debate of 2008, here's a question to ponder: is Reaganism dead? Short answer: you betcha. From Bloomberg:

Crunch time for McCain? Perhaps--for on Wednesday night at his final debate with Barack Obama, John McCain has a do-or-die decision to make. To Atwater or not to Atwater--that is the question. (If you're too young to get the Atwater reference, look it up.) And whatever his answer is, McCain is poised to disappoint--perhaps alienate--one of two crucial blocs of voters.

The Republican party's base wants blood. They cannot believe that a former community activist (read: Socialist!) with barely a moment's experience in Washington who is a secret Muslim and quasi-Black Panther is close to the presidency. For them, the association game--tying Obama to former, bomb-throwing radical Bill Ayers and extreme-rhetoric-hurling Jeremiah Wright--ought to be a fundamental part of the McCain campaign, for these connections reveal the real Obama. Obama, they contend, is fooling the voting public by coming across as a mainstream, composed, confident politician who reasonably talks of consensus-building and change. In their view, he is both the embodiment of the evils of the 1960s and Islamofascism. A sleeper agent. A Manchurian candidate from Mecca. But he is so skilled at keeping his true loyalties covert, he can only be exposed via his ties to Ayers and Wright. This is not guilt by association or the petty politics of personal destruction. It's the key to decoding Obama. Its what must be done so the Republic does not fall into the hands of an internal enemy.

And it was only a few days ago that McCain and Sarah Palin were on the Ayers trail. She accused Obama of "palling" around with domestic terrorists. (She used the plural.) McCain promised a supporter he would raise this connection at the final debate.

But recent polling has indicated that McCain's attacks on Obama have lost him support among voters. More voters see McCain as the more negative of the two candidates and less concerned with issues than Obama. McCain's assaults are simply not working--especially when tethered to McCain's erratic moves regarding the economic crisis. So if he goes all Ayers (or Wright) on Obama, he faces a real risk: pissing off indie and uncommitted voters. But, then, if he holds his fire on this front, he will anger the die-hard conservatives who want to see him pummel Obama and expose the true Obama to the entire world.

John McCain offers his newest lurch today.

In a speech he is scheduled to give in Virginia Beach on Monday, McCain says 17 times that he will fight for America, according to his prepared remarks. He repeatedly calls himself a "fighter." And he's an experienced fighter who won't--like you know who--have to study up on issues before making command decisions.

Over and over in this new stump speech, McCain says he is ready to fight--for the country, for change, for a new direction, for the future, for the children, for justice for all. Seriously.

Times are tough, McCain notes, but America is worth fighting. It needs a fighter like John McCain, who is a real fighter who has always been a fighter for America.

In other words, vote for the fight guy. Here's how the speech ends:

The other day a Republican strategist shared an intriguing anecdote with me. Several years ago, he said, he was talking to Steve Schmidt, who now is the day-to-day manager of John McCain's campaign, and Schmidt said that he hated McCain to such an extent that he would vote for Hillary Clinton instead of McCain if such a choice ever presented itself. "He really said that?" I asked my source. "Beer was involved," this source replied.

These days, Schmidt, who was a senior operative for the Bush-Cheney 2004 campaign, is responsible for getting McCain elected to the White House. No wonder there are problems in McCainland. I'm not suggesting that Schmidt is sabotaging the McCain campaign from the inside. He's a fierce political pro who cares mightily about getting another notch. He doesn't want to be burdened with a loss. But this tale underscores a fundamental reason for McCain's up-to-now failure. His campaign is being run by traditional Republican ops who are using the traditional Republican playbook which relies on the good ol' political tradition of hate-mongering. Which is not how McCain ran for the presidency in 2000.

Many of the folks in charge of the McCain campaign don't really care that much for him. Worse, they are treating McCain as a generic Republican candidate--smothering whatever once was special about him. And McCain has allowed this to happen. He has emasculated himself.

Look at those recent McCain rallies. His supporters are shouting "terrorist" when McCain mentions his opponent. And does McCain chastise them for doing so? No. In fact, he has been pushing the Obama-hangs-with-terrorists theme. Sarah Palin did so explicitly a few days ago by accusing Obama of "paling" around with terrorists--note the plural--a reference to Obama's past association with William Ayers, a former Weather Underground member who became a much-respected education expert. And on Thursday, McCain promised an angry supporter at a rally that he would bring up the Ayers link at the next debate. (Kudos to Joe Biden who, at a Thursday rally, slammed McCain for not having the guts to have done so to Obama's face at Tuesday nights' night. Nice touch: Biden took off his coat as he challenged McCain, noting that in Biden's old neighborhood if you had something to say about a guy, you said it straight to him. It looked as if Biden was preparing for a street brawl.)

My take on the second debate, first posted at MotherJones.com....

Last Thursday, during a McCain campaign town hall meeting in Denver, one participant stood up and challenged the GOP presidential candidate: "When are you going to take the gloves off?" His fellow McCain supporters in the downtown hotel roared with approval. "How about Tuesday night?" John McCain replied, referring to his second debate with Obama.

How about not? The McCain campaign in recent days has pumped up its effort to delegitimize Barack Obama, with its top strategist apparently calculating that McCain cannot vanquish Obama if the election is about issues. At a recent rally in a California suburb, GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin declared "Our opponent...is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their own country." (This was a reference to Obama's past association with Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground radical who became an education expert). And on Monday, McCain delivered a blistering attack on Obama that was loaded with inaccuracies and distortions. So one expectation among the politerati was that McCain would continue swinging--or thrashing--at the second debate. Work in Bill Ayers. Refer to Jeremiah Wright. Depict Obama as shifty and untrustworthy.

That did not happen. McCain, trailing Obama in the polls, mainly trained his fire on policy matters. He did continue to hurl misrepresentations at Obama. (As the debate proceeded, I received 40 emails from the Obama campaign making this point.) For instance, McCain once again claimed that Obama has voted 94 times to raise taxes, a charge that has been widely debunked by various factchecking outfits. But there was no frontal assault on Obama's character--and only one or two slight digs on his qualifications. The debate was more high-minded than anticipated. But it demonstrated a tough reality for McCain: he is out of sync with his own campaign. He cannot pull the trigger, when his advisers seem to believe a machine gun blast is needed.

Obama and his campaign are fully integrated. He calls for a break from the past eight years on both domestic and foreign fronts and famously urges fundamental change. As a new face--and a black man--he sure does represent change. He is his message. And his campaign for over a year and a half has not had to go through any strategic lurches or had to reconfigure either its candidate or its core pitch. That's not true on the McCain side. His campaign has been nothing but lurches. And the most recent one--a turn toward even more negative campaigning--undercuts his old and now practically worn-out reputation as a straight-talking maverick. So come Debate II, McCain was confronting a tough choice: damned if he does (go negative) and stalled if he doesn't.

Deciding to forego the nasty stuff, McCain relied on policy differences to hammer Obama. The problem: Obama's policy prescriptions are not unpopular.

I don't often make political predictions. But I will issues this one: the presidential debate on Tuesday night will show if John McCain has any soul left.

I admit it: I used to be one of those liberal reporters/saps in Washington who fancied McCain in the late 1990s and during his 2000 presidential run. In those days, he was about as enjoyable as a senator came--and about as publicly candid. And it was fun to watch him poke the GOP in the eye on campaign finance reform and tobacco. It's not as if I believed he was worth voting for in a general election; he was still archly conservative in important ways. But he was indeed a different type of Republican and provided entertaining company in the Green Room or on the campaign trail.

Those days are long gone. McCain leveraged his soul at the end of the 2000 campaign at the GOP convention, when he gave a speech sucking up to George W. Bush, whose campaign had maligned him viciously during the primaries. It was as if a switch was flipped, and McCain realized his only true path to greater power was to make nice (generally) with the Republican establishment and the GOP base. It was a calculation with some logic to it, as 2008 proved. But it meant he had to jettison his best parts.

So we're left today with a fellow who still appears to believe he is a straight-talking maverick--when he is actually just another pol who will say practically anything to get elected and who has turned his campaign over to the sort of whatever-it-takes political operatives he once derided.

Look at his speech from Monday. It was chockfull of misrepresentations that are hard not to call lies. From The New York Times' analysis:

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:

Here's what I posted on MotherJones.com regarding the Palin-Biden face-off....

For the past few weeks, it's seemed as if Sarah Palin has been a contestant in the ultimate version of the reality show America's Toughest Jobs. She passed the first challenge: give a Big Speech. She did fine on the next one: hit the campaign trail. She royally screwed up the third challenge: give a Big Interview. Then came the most difficult one: hold your own in a Big Debate. And she did.

For 90 minutes Governor Palin, who had become a bleeding ulcer for the McCain campaign, stuck to well-crafted talking points, recited them with passion and conviction, and played the part of the spunky, down-home, up-North middle-class-mom-turned-governor well. She did not demonstrate much depth in policy knowledge, but she managed to display treading-water familiarity with the obvious issues of the day. (Media and advocacy group factcheckers will soon be producing the list of her factual misrepresentations.) It helped that moderator Gwen Ifill did not pose questions that might push her off her script. Palin repeated buzz phrases--"greed and corruption of Wall Street," for instance--over and over. (She was obviously coached to use the word maverick repeatedly, former Republican Senator Rick Santorum observed after the debate.) For some viewers, her autopilot replies might be a turnoff. But for conservatives and independents who want to like her, she probably performed well enough--and she probably performed well enough to stop the hemorrhaging she had caused the campaign.

Which means that perhaps John McCain will return to center stage, as Palin--and her uninformed responses to Katie Couric's questions--becomes less of an issue.

There were no grand moments during the debate--and no bad moments for either Palin or Joe Biden, the Other Man of the evening. Palin did what a veep candidate is supposed to do: tout the head of the ticket and attack the person topping the other ticket. She reiterated the McCain's camp's usual attacks on Barack Obama: he wants to raise taxes and lose a war. More important, she sought to sell herself as the Everymom who knows firsthand the concerns of middle-class Americans who fret about their kids, health coverage, and college tuition. But other than talk about tax cuts, tax cuts, and tax cuts, Palin didn't have much to offer such voters policy-wise. When she referred to McCain's health care plan, Biden countered that the campaign's proposal to tax health care benefits would lead to millions losing coverage that costs an average of $12,000 a year and that McCain's proposed $5000 tax credit for health care plans would not make up the gap. "I call that the ultimate Bridge to Nowhere," Biden quipped--in one of his few quippy moments of the evening. And there was that moment Palin seemingly endorsed Dick Cheney's expansive view of the vice presidency. Biden replied that Cheney "has been the most dangerous vice president we've had probably in American history."

What Palin relied on was her style. Her message: I'm like you. And I'm darn feisty. When Biden pointed out she had not responded to his charge that McCain has been a champion deregulator for years and shares part of the blame for the current financial crisis, she shot back: "I may not answer the questions that either the moderator or you want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people." At another point, Palin, in an aw-shucks manner, celebrated her status as a non-Washingtonian. It came after Biden noted that he had voted in 2002 to give Bush the authority to attack Iraq but had warned that an invasion without strong ally support would lead to a costly war lasting for years. Palin replied, "Oh, yeah, it's so obvious I'm a Washington outsider. And someone just not used to the way you guys operate. Because here you voted for the war and now you oppose the war. You're one who says, as so many politicians do, I was for it before I was against it or vice-versa." And she played to the voters within the conservative base--who already know she is one of them--by calling Obama's' tax plan a redistribution of wealth and by talking about the need to "fight for our freedoms." She seemed to suggest that if Obama and Biden were elected freedom would take a blow and "we're going to find ourselves spending our sunset years telling our children and our children's children about a time in America, back in the day, when men and women were free."

How uninformed is Sarah Palin? I don't mean to suggest she is dumb in the sense of intelligence ability--though she may be. But despite the fact she has good campaign skills--which could be on display during her debate with Joe Biden--Palin is dumb in the sense of don't-know-much-about-history or anything else. Ignorance, you might call it. Sure, she must know plenty about Alaska issues, but she seems to be awfully unfamiliar with anything beyond that.

Take the latest clip from her interterview with Katie Couric. What drew the most attention was her inability to name any other Supreme Court decision other than Roe v. Wade. It may be elitist to say this, but she looked the fool, trying to answer the question ("What other Supreme Court decisions do you disagree with?") without citing any specific decision. (Dred Scott, anyone?) The subsequent chortling among commentators and bloggers was warranted.

But what struck me was this exchange:

Couric: Do you think there's an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution?

Palin: I do. Yeah, I do.

Couric: The cornerstone of Roe v. Wade.

Palin: I do. And I believe that individual states can best handle what the people within the different constituencies in the 50 states would like to see their will ushered in an issue like that.

As my colleague at MotherJones.com, Kevin Drum, pointed out, many conservatives do not accept that the Constitution contains a right to privacy and argue that it's judicial activism to see such a right in that grand ol' document. Is Palin breaking with this traditional conservative position?

I doubt it. She probably didn't know better. But her convoluted explanation of her position demonstrates she doesn't understand the basics of the Constitution. First she says there is an inherent right to privacy in the Constitution, then she adds that this right is dependent on what "different constituencies in the 50 states would like to see."

A federal right is not dependent on the "will ushered" in the 50 different states. Otherwise, what good are any of the rights outlined in the Bill of Rights? Sometimes a state may act in a way that is seen by some as a restriction on a constitutional right--say, imposing gun control measures--but then the matter goes to the federal courts for resolution. In the United States, a right guaranteed in the Constitution is not open to 50 different interpretations.

Palin is running for a position in which, if she wins, she will have to take a vow to "preserve, protect and defend the Constitution" (per Article II, Section I of the Constitution). Is it too much to expect her to understand that document and its history?

My favorite campaign spin of recent days comes from conservatives who fancy Sarah Palin. Much of the reality-based world--which even includes a few conservative commentators, such as George Will, David Brooks, Kathleen Parker, and David Frum--has rendered a verdict on Palin: she's not up to the job. Many voters seem to agree. McCain's post-Palin bounce is gone. Her approval rating in Alaska has dropped.

Blame Palin's fall on Katie Couric--if not Palin herself? No, declares a group of Palin fans on the right: blame it on the Bushies. That is, McCain campaign operatives--most of whom are veterans of the past Bush campaigns--who supposedly are not letting Sarah be Sarah. Here's Bill Kristol:

McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her -- aides who seem to have succeeded in importing to the Palin campaign the trademark defensive crouch of the Bush White House. McCain picked Sarah Palin in part because she's a talented politician and communicator. He needs to free her to use her political talents and to communicate in her own voice.

I'm told McCain recently expressed unhappiness with his staff's handling of Palin. On Sunday he dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to join Palin in Philadelphia. They're supposed to liberate Palin to go on the offensive as a combative conservative in the vice-presidential debate on Thursday.

Apparently Kristol believes that Palin's "political talents" can trump--or distract voters from--her lack of experience and knowledge (as she demonstrated with Couric). Shouldn't he loose his Official Public Intellectual Card for putting rhetoric ahead of substance?

Then there's Richard Viguerie, chairman of ConservativeHQ.com and a longtime strategist for the conservative movement. He's released a statement chiding McCain:

He must free Sarah Palin to go after Barack Obama and the liberal Democrats, or he will almost certainly lose.

The McCain campaign has put this 'pit bull with lipstick' on a leash. The campaign has surrounded her with people from the Bush administration. And as we can see from the wreckage of the Bush presidencies, these folks don't have the slightest clue how to make a case to the American people.

McCain has to get rid of these Bush people around Palin, along with the lobbyists and the folks from the Washington PR firms, and replace them with principled conservatives who have experience making the case for conservatism.

If only more conservatives would lobby the McCain camp to set Sarah free. And if only the McCain camp would listen. I'd like to see an unhandled Palin. (So would Tina Fey.)

No doubt, Palin is a talented campaigner. That's been proven in the past few weeks when she appears at rallies. But she cannot handle basic questions. This no surprise--especially since she cannot name a single magazine or newspaper she reads regularly. (Not the Weekly Standard?) Palin has not spent much time in her life pondering such matters as foreign policy or economic national policy. That's the reality, and a month's worth of cramming is not going to change that and get her up to speed. The public witnessed the real Palin in the Couric interview.

Kristol and Viguerie seem to think that Palin can hide her ignorance behind slashing attacks on Democrats and liberals. But it may be too late for such a strategy of obfuscation.