The GOP smear machine revs up

BARACK OBAMA can deliver a brilliant speech tonight, but its impact could evaporate within days. John McCain and his allies have opened the 2008 Swift Boating season. Four years ago, a smear outfit called Swift Boat Veterans for Truth began trashing John Kerry's Vietnam War record. Kerry was never the same.

Helter Skelter. What the GOP does is throw out so many attacks that the target and voters get confused and disoriented. This all-out Helter Skelter Republican attack machine is something Obama has never experienced.

It always starts small. A small lie. First, they say he's like Paris Hilton. Then he's why gas prices are high. Then he'll raise taxes on the middle class (Funny how powerful Obama is for a man who lacks experience.)

The escalation. McCain's part of the attack machine quickly ginned up a TV spot showing newly minted VP candidate Joe Biden at an early debate saying Obama wasn't ready to be president. Next they found video clips of Hillary Clinton criticizing Obama - imagine, one Democrat knocking another in the middle of a heated primary! Such things never happen to Republicans.

McCain vs. the Pig. During the Republican primary, John McCain and Mitt Romney tangled over immigration. McCain said this about Romney: "Never get into a wrestling match with a pig. You both get dirty and the pig likes it."

The book of lies. Four years ago his book smeared John Kerry's war service. Now Jerome Corsi has a book out on Obama, published by none other than Mary Matalin, longtime hit-woman for the attack machine for the Bushes and Dick Cheney.

Corsi regurgitates every ugly rumor about Obama. He even asks if Obama has continued to use drugs since high school and college. The book contained so many lies and distortions that the Obama campaign had to issue a 40-page response.

The weirding begins. The favorite move of the GOP attack machine is to define an opponent as weird, outside the mainstream of America's Brady Bunch self-image. Michael Dukakis was weird because he was an ethnic, Northeast liberal who carried an ACLU card, and as governor vetoed a bill making the pledge of allegiance mandatory. Obviously, Dukakis hates America.

Obama is weird because of his race, name, upbringing outside the continental United States, and a host of malicious lies: He doesn't put his hand on his heart during the national anthem (wrong). He's a closeted Muslim (false). He attended an anti-American madrassa school (nope). He was sworn into office on the Koran (untrue). He snubbed hospitalized veterans while in Germany (bogus).

Michelle Obama, according to attack machine gunner Rush Limbaugh, was seen on a video berating "whitey" at some meeting. Supposedly she wasn't referring to Bulger. Regardless, no such video has ever been found.

Got surge? The right-wing Vets for Freedom has started a $1.1 million TV campaign in key states that uses three veterans of the Iraq war who knock Obama for not supporting the surge in Iraq.

The Ayers TV spot. The American Issues Project is running a TV commercial making it seem as though Barack Obama and Bill Ayers, an unrepentant radical in the 1960s and '70s, are best friends and that Obama supports his violent acts.

Get some Justice. Obama's campaign has demanded that the Justice Department investigate the Ayers spot, claiming it's electioneering, not issue advocacy. Dallas megamillionaire Harold Simmons is bankrolling the ad. By himself. Simmons was a major donor to the Swift Boat smear job against Kerry and has raised more than $50,000 this time for McCain. Hard to call this an independent expenditure.

Yet another hit man, who shall go nameless because he thrives on publicity, created the infamous Willie Horton TV spot that attacked Dukakis for a weekend prison furlough program that resulted in a convicted murderer traveling to Maryland where he brutally beat a man and raped his fiancee.

The nameless one is now attacking Obama in a TV spot for opposing in the Illinois state Legislature a bill to extend the death penalty to gang murderers, after the killing of innocent Chicagoans during gang gunplay.

Formula for defeat. White bigots + lies about Obama + Hillary holdouts = President McCain. Nothing Obama says tonight can change that. Enjoy it because the next 68 days won't be fun.

Dan Payne is a Boston-area media consultant who has worked for Democratic candidates around the country. He does political analysis for WBUR radio.