McCain's desperate tactics

AS THE presidential campaign enters its final weeks, John McCain resembles a journeyman boxer, behind on every scorecard and struggling desperately to land a knockout punch.

His lurching pursuit of a nimble rival has led to some jarring shifts between McCain's dueling personas, Johnny Be Good and Mack the Knife.

Speaking at the Alfred E. Smith dinner last Thursday, McCain was hilarious and high-minded, his praise for his rival the picture of gentlemanly grace.

How curious, then, that at the same time, automated calls paid for in part by the McCain campaign were highlighting Barack Obama's distant relationship with former 1960s radical and domestic terrorist Bill Ayers.

Most voters are smart enough to see through that attempt at guilt by association. According to a new ABC News/Washington Post poll, 60 percent of likely voters say that relationship is not a legitimate issue.

Still, as any flimflam artist knows, you can fool some of the people some of the time - particularly with robo calls that deliver this mendacious message: "You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans."

Why, a skeptic could be forgiven for suspecting the intent was to gull the unwary into thinking Obama had actually worked with Ayers during his Weather Underground days. Actually, their association, which the nonpartisan truth squad FactCheck.org notes was "never very close," started decades later, in the 1990s. It included involvement with two nonprofit organizations and an event at Ayers's home during Obama's first state Senate campaign, in 1995.

In endorsing Obama on Sunday, former secretary of state Colin Powell decried attempts to use Ayers to taint Obama, aptly describing it as "demagoguery."

McCain friend and former strategist John Weaver tells me he's "disappointed" by the tactic. "The focus here should be on the economy," Weaver says. "That's what people are talking about."

It's hardly McCain's only attempt to land a roundhouse right. In another, McCain and Sarah Palin are suggesting that Obama favors socialism because he wants to raise income taxes on the wealthy and offer a tax break for the middle class and the less well-to-do.

Now, it's true that if Obama gets his way, upper-earners would help fund a tax cut for workers of more modest means, many of whom don't pay any income tax. (My view is that, given our huge federal deficit, proposals for big, permanent tax cuts by either candidate are irresponsible.) However, the tax cut in question would go only to workers who pay federal payroll (Social Security and Medicare) taxes; no one would get back more than he paid in those taxes.

Certainly it's quintessential silliness - conservative talk-radio silliness, even - to equate that $65 billion plan with socialism, a philosophy that calls for state ownership of the means of production and state distribution of national income. The Bush administration's emergency intervention in the financial markets, which McCain supported, is a much larger step in that direction.

Even someone as accomplished at the politics of convenience as Mitt Romney balked at McCain's description. "That's not the word I'd use," he told CNN.

As he flails away, McCain is adopting a tactic, if not the exact words, Romney did use in his 2002 gubernatorial bid: warning against turning all branches of government over to the Democrats.

Given the recent Republican record, traction there may be hard to generate. The Bush administration, after all, is going out like the Titanic. And as for the GOP reign in Congress, well, here's how Ron Kaufman, White House political director under President George H.W. Bush, puts it: "In 1994 Republicans said, give us control of Congress and we will govern wisely, we will tax less and have smaller government, and we will do it ethically and morally. In 2006 they fired us for not doing that."

Still, unlike the shameful Ayers offensive, tax policy and single-party control of government are at least legitimate issues.

And for McCain, that's progress.

Scot Lehigh can be reached at lehigh@globe.com.