Pledges to take high road fall short

Both McCain, Obama camps change their tone

Supporters of John McCain and Barack Obama gathered at Nashville's Belmont University, site of last night's debate. (Mark Humphrey/Associated Press)

NASHVILLE - When the Tennessee Republican Party issued a press release in February titled "Anti-Semites for Obama" - with references to "Barack Hussein Obama" and a picture of the senator in a traditional Somali outfit that it described as "Muslim" - likely Republican nominee John McCain took one of his first stands as party figurehead to condemn it.

"If I am the nominee of the party, I will obviously assure that everyone within my party knows that this has got to be a respectful debate," McCain said then. Two months later, McCain delivered a similar rebuke to the North Carolina Republican Party for an ad about Obama's relationship to Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying "there's no place for that kind of campaigning."

At the time, Obama offered a reciprocal gesture, declaring that McCain's involvement in the "Keating Five" congressional influence-peddling scandal two decades ago was "not germane to the presidency."

As their parties' nominees, neither McCain nor Obama has campaigned in Tennessee. But as they prepared to meet last night in Nashville - after days of exchanges about Obama's relationship with '60s radical William Ayers and McCain's with convicted felon Charles Keating - those springtime vows continue to define the bounds of propriety in a race that has turned increasingly negative.

"The limits are that the American people don't want to hear very much of it," said Senator Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, who led fellow Republicans in condemning the February press release.

"The real limits are that in a debate, they are feet from each other and real people are in front of them. It's easier to attack your opponent when he's not standing 3 feet from you."

At a fund-raising lunch for congressman Jim Cooper where much of Nashville's Democratic establishment gathered yesterday for chicken cutlets and cinnamon tarts, February was recalled as a moment in a presidential contest that "The Economist" once called "America at its best."

"McCain got desperate. Desperate people do desperate things," said George Barrett, a Nashville lawyer and onetime aide to Senator Albert Gore Sr., whose career-ending defeat in 1970 is attributed partly to his insufficient instinct for combat. "McCain claimed he was going to take the high road, but he fell in the gutter."

McCain has not invoked Obama's middle name or talked about his religion, and aides this week said that Wright - and his record of statements widely perceived as unpatriotic - remained off-limits even as McCain's running mate told a columnist that she thought they should not be. "I don't know why that association isn't discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country," Sarah Palin said.

Each side has nurtured its own narrative of the campaign's increased obsession with character as inscribed by one's circle of acquaintances. Obama aides say that McCain led the descent into cynicism with his summertime mockery of Obama as a vapid celebrity and subsequent distortion of his positions on issues like sex education. They are reminding voters of McCain's involvement in the Keating banking scandal this week only because McCain and Palin put the focus on Obama's connections to Ayers, they said..

"Their guilt-by-association approach is different," said Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki, arguing that Keating became germane because banking scandals have dominated recent news.

For McCain aides, the story begins in February. McCain's condemnations of state-party attacks on Obama, along with his proposals for the two candidates to jointly accept public financing and campaign together at town-hall meetings, were evidence that they sought a high-minded campaign. What changed, they say, is that Obama rejected those entreaties and embarked on a campaign of "association politics" by stigmatizing McCain advisers for their work as lobbyists.

"You can want to win too badly in this business," said Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, a close McCain friend. "Senator Obama is very talented, but he wants to win too much."

Tennessee Democrats seemed encouraged by the idea that if they did nothing else for Obama's campaign, they might give him a prominent venue to continue a tussle started by Republicans.

"I'm delighted to see his much more aggressive response," said Bob Tuke, Alexander's Democratic opponent. "I'm a Marine. If these people want to fight, they ought to buckle their chinstraps."