How Low Will Palin Go in Her Mudslinging?

Sarah Palin's charge that Barack Obama is "palling around with terrorists" may mark the descent of Campaign 2008 into the sewer that has marked so many other recent U.S. elections. But her comments operate on another level, too, continuing to brand anyone who criticizes George W. Bush’s neoconservative foreign policy as un-American.

The Alaska governor's larger point -- made in her Oct. 2 debate and on the campaign stump since then -- is that Obama is a person who dares to find fault with U.S. policies overseas and thus deserves to have his patriotism questioned.

"Our opponent," Palin told Republican supporters during a post-debate speech in Colorado, "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."

Palin added about Obama, "This is not a man who sees America like you and I see America. We see America as a force of good in this world. We see an America of exceptionalism."

It's unclear if Palin understood the full significance of her reference to American "exceptionalism," the theory preached by the neoconservatives who led her debate prep. They argue that the United States has the exceptional right to operate outside international law. But Palin does grasp the political usefulness of smearing an opponent in the style of Jeane Kirkpatrick, who in 1984 famously defined critics of Ronald Reagan's aggressive foreign policy as people who would "blame America first."

Palin is, in effect, labeling Obama a blame-America-firster. In the vice presidential debate, Palin twisted Obama's 2007 analysis of U.S. military strategy in Afghanistan -- which called for more troops on the ground to reduce reliance on air strikes that had killed civilians -- into him condemning everything the U.S. military has done in Afghanistan.

"Barack Obama had said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians," Palin said. "And such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause." With the blessings of John McCain's campaign, Palin then expanded on this "character" assault against Obama by citing his tenuous connection to former Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers as well as recalling the controversy over Obama's former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

Though McCain has in the past decried this sort of personal smear tactic -- especially when he was the victim in 2000 -- his campaign has announced, rather openly, its intent to go negative on Obama in a guilt-by-association barrage in the weeks before Nov. 4.

New Assault

Several top Republicans told the Washington Post that "McCain and his Republican allies are readying a newly aggressive assault on Sen. Barack Obama's character, believing that to win in November they must shift the conversation back to questions about the Democrat's judgment, honesty and personal associations."

McCain aides also left no doubt that the strategy would have a McCarthyistic tinge by highlighting Obama's limited connections to Ayers, who as a young man in the late 1960s and early 1970s, veered off into violent radicalism in protest of the slaughter going on in the Vietnam War. Ayers became a leader of an extreme faction, known as the Weathermen, that planted bombs at the Pentagon and the U.S. Capitol. After years of living underground, Ayers surfaced and escaped a prison sentence in 1974 because of prosecutorial misconduct in his case.

Though never disavowing his rationale for reacting to the Vietnam War violence by trying to bring a small measure of that violence back home, Ayers expressed regret for some of his actions and quietly built a life as a Chicago-based college professor focusing on educational issues.

Possibly because Ayers came from a family with deep ties in the Chicago establishment -- his father had served as chief executive of Commonwealth Edison -- the ex-student radical was given a kind of second chance to turn his expertise to the good of his community.