Campaign getting personal

Get ready to hear a lot about Bill Ayers and Charles Keating this week, likely including Tuesday night's second presidential debate.

Republican John McCain is trying to move the campaign off the economy -- an issue on which Democratic rival Barack Obama has a clear edge and has ridden to a clear lead in national polls and surveys in a bevy of battleground states -- and has apparently decided to go after Obama's character.

So McCain is seeking to capitalize on new attention, including a New York Times story on Saturday, on Bill Ayers, a founder of a radical group that planned bombings at the US Capitol and Pentagon. Ayers and Obama have crossed paths in Chicago, but Obama has denounced him.

That isn't stopping McCain's camp from describing Ayers and Obama as friends, and trying to link the two.

"Turns out, one of his earliest supporters is a man named Bill Ayers. And according to The New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist," McCain's running mate Sarah Palin told voters in Clearwater, Fla., this morning. "Wow. And there’s even more to the story....In fact, Obama held one of the first meetings of his political career in Bill Ayers’s home. And they’ve worked together on various projects in Chicago.

Palin said of Obama, "This is someone who sees America as 'imperfect enough' to work with a former domestic terrorist who targeted his own country."

The Times story itself, however, says the ties between Obama and Ayers are tenuous at best.

But McCain's campaign has not backed down on the Ayers connection.

“The last four weeks of this election will be about whether the American people are willing to turn our economy and national security over to Barack Obama, a man with little record, questionable judgment, and ties to radical figures like unrepentant domestic terrorist William Ayers. Americans need to ask themselves if they've ever befriended an unrepentant terrorist, or had a convicted felon help them buy their house -- because those aren't smears, those are true facts about Barack Obama,” McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said in a statement.

Palin also brought up Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., in an interview with New York Times columnist William Kristol published today.

During the primaries, Obama denounced Wright and severed ties with his Chicago church after videotapes surfaced showing Wright making anti-American and anti-Semitic comments from the pulpit.

"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," Palin told Kristol. "To me, that does say something about character. But, you know, I guess that would be a John McCain call on whether he wants to bring that up."

Obama responded to the Ayers attacks in an interview this morning on the syndicated Tom Joyner radio show, which has a sizable African-American audience.

"He engaged in these despicable acts 40 years ago, when I was 8 years old. I served on a board with him. And so now they're trying to use this as guilt by association," Obama said.

"I think the American people deserve better. I think they deserve a last four weeks that talks about the economic crisis," Obama continued. "But if John McCain wants to have a character debate, I'm happy to have that debate because Mr. McCain's record, despite him calling himself a maverick, actually shows that he is continually somebody who relies on lobbyists....He makes decisions, often times, based on what these lobbyists tell them him to do. That I think is going to be a lot more relevant to the American people than what somebody who is tangentially related to me."

McCain's campaign is jumping on remarks made by Obama aides today that the candidate did not know of Ayers' background when he held an event for Obama's state Senate campaign.

John Roberts of CNN asked, "I just want to try to get to the heart of it so that people at home can understand. Our Jim Acosta talked with your senior strategist David Axelrod about this. In 1995, William Ayers held kind of a get-to-know you event at his place where he was introducing Barack Obama to the political culture there in Chicago when he was running for the State Senate for the first time. David Axelrod said that at that meeting Senator Obama was not aware of Ayers' radical background. Is that true?"

Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director, replied, "Look, if that's what David said, that is true. Look, again, this is a relationship, excuse me, that Barack Obama has condemned the actions of Bill Ayers."

McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds asked, “Does Barack Obama truly expect the American people to believe that he had no idea about his friend’s past as the infamous founder of the domestic terror group ‘The Weather Underground’ or is he just lying? If Obama didn't know in 1995 about the bombings Ayers was responsible for, when did he find out -- because Obama was promoting Ayers' book in 1997, serving on boards with him until 2002, and trading emails and phone calls with him as recently as 2005. If Obama really was unaware of Ayers' radical past, learning the truth doesn't seem to have had any effect on their friendship. Whether Barack Obama is lying to voters about his previous support for higher taxes on the middle class, his votes against funds for American troops in the field or his associations with an unrepentant terrorist, voters are left wondering who Obama is and what he stands for."

In speeches over the weekend, Obama accused McCain of wanting to turn the page on the economy by launching Swift Boat-style attacks on him, referring to the assaults four years ago on Senator John F. Kerry's Vietnam War record.

"Senator McCain and his operatives are gambling that he can distract you with smears rather than talk to you about substance. They’d rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up. It’s what you do when you’re out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time," Obama said Sunday in Asheville, N.C.

In response, Obama is also bringing back up McCain's ties to Keating, a key figure in the 1980s savings and loan scandal that almost killed McCain's political career. In 1991, the Senate Ethics Committee reprimanded McCain for his "poor judgment" in advocating for Keating, a major campaign contributor in Arizona, with federal regulators.

Obama's campaign has put up a 30-second web ad and this afternoon unveiled a 13-minute documentary on its website called "Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis."

In an email to supporters, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe wrote, ``The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain's Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts -- and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain.''

McCain's camp insists that the Keating matter is different than Ayers.

"The difference here is clear: John McCain has been open and honest about the Keating matter, and even the Democratic special counsel in charge recommended that Senator McCain be completely exonerated. By contrast, Barack Obama has been fundamentally dishonest about his friendship and work with the unrepentant terrorist William Ayers, whose radical group bombed the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. Nor has Barack Obama come clean on his close friendship with Tony Rezko, a felon convicted on bribery charges who subsidized the purchase of Barack Obama’s home. It's obvious that Barack Obama is frantically attacking because he knows that most voters find these kinds of friendships, and the failed judgment they expose, to be unacceptable for our next president," McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said in a statement.

The Democratic National Committee has a web video warning of a raft of personal attacks on the way against Obama by McCain.

And Palin telegraphed that to Florida voters today.

"Hang on to your hats," she told them. "From now until election day, it might get kind of rough."

In a speech this afternoon in Albuquerque, N.M., McCain suggested that Obama's response to the Ayers and other criticisms should raise concerns for voters.

"My opponent has invited serious questioning by announcing a few weeks ago that he would quote -- 'take off the gloves.' Since then, whenever I have questioned his policies or his record, he has called me a liar," McCain said.

"Rather than answer his critics, Senator Obama will try to distract you from noticing that he never answers the serious and legitimate questions he has been asked. But let me reply in the plainest terms I know. I don’t need lessons about telling the truth to American people. And were I ever to need any improvement in that regard, I probably wouldn’t seek advice from a Chicago politician.

"My opponent’s touchiness every time he is questioned about his record should make us only more concerned. For a guy who’s already authored two memoirs, he’s not exactly an open book. It’s as if somehow the usual rules don’t apply, and where other candidates have to explain themselves and their records, Senator Obama seems to think he is above all that. Whatever the question, whatever the issue, there’s always a back story with Senator Obama. All people want to know is: What has this man ever actually accomplished in government? What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama? But ask such questions and all you get in response is another barrage of angry insults."

UPDATE: Responded Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor, “On a day when the markets are plunging and the credit crisis is putting millions of jobs at risk, the one truly angry candidate in this race kept up his strategy of ‘turning the page’ on the economy by unleashing another frustrated tirade against Barack Obama. And if John McCain is wondering why he’s lost his credibility, he should look no further than the out-of-context quote he took from a 2007 speech in which Barack Obama warned of the subprime crisis we’re now facing. Since then, John McCain has called for less regulation no fewer than 20 times, proving that he hasn’t learned any lessons from the last banking scandal he was involved in and would give us more of the same failed economic policies as President.”