McCain Planning 'Fiercely' Negative Campaign In Final Days

John 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," several top Republicans told the Washington Post.

With just a month to go until Election Day, McCain's team has decided that its emphasis on the senator's biography as a war hero, experienced lawmaker and straight-talking maverick is insufficient to close a growing gap with Obama. The Arizonan's campaign is also eager to move the conversation away from the economy, an issue that strongly favors Obama and has helped him to a lead in many recent polls.

"We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here," said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity. [...]

Moments after the House of Representatives approved a bailout package for Wall Street on Friday afternoon, the McCain campaign released a television ad that challenges Obama's honesty and asks, "Who is Barack Obama?" The ad alleges that "Senator Obama voted 94 times for higher taxes. Ninety-four times. He's not truthful on taxes." The charge that Obama voted 94 times for higher taxes has been called misleading by independent fact-checkers, who have noted that the majority of those votes were on nonbinding budget resolutions.

A senior campaign official called the ad "just the beginning" of commercials that will "strike the new tone" in the campaign's final days. The official said the "aggressive tone" will center on the question of "whether this guy is ready to be president."

The Obama campaign painted the Post story as evidence that the McCain campaign is trying to disregard the country's serious economic challenges in favor of personal attacks on Obama:

"On a day after we learned that America lost three-quarters of a million jobs this year and a week after our financial system teetered on the brink of collapse, John McCain and his campaign have announced that they want to 'turn the page' on the economic crisis facing working families and spend the last month of this election launching dishonest, dishonorable character attacks against Barack Obama. We understand that it's not easy for John McCain to defend the worst economic record of our lifetime, but he will have to explain to the people struggling to pay their bills and stay in their homes why he would rather spend his time tearing down Barack Obama than laying out a plan to build up our economy," said Obama-Biden Spokesman Bill Burton.

Obama's team also released this web ad hammering McCain over the new job loss numbers:

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Palin’s Alternate Universe

By BOB HERBERT

Sarah Palin is the perfect exclamation point to the Bush years.

We’ve lived through nearly two terms of an administration that believed it could create its own reality:

“Deficits don’t matter.” “Brownie, you’re doing a heckuva job.” “Those weapons of mass destruction must be somewhere.”

Now comes Ms. Palin, a smiling, bubbly vice-presidential candidate who travels in an alternate language universe. For Ms. Palin, such things as context, syntax and the proximity of answers to questions have no meaning.

In her closing remarks at the vice-presidential debate Thursday night, Ms. Palin referred earnestly, if loosely, to a quote from Ronald Reagan. He had warned that if Americans weren’t vigilant in protecting their freedom, they would find themselves spending their “sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was like in America when men were free.”

What Ms. Palin didn’t say was that the menace to freedom that Reagan was talking about was Medicare. As the historian Robert Dallek has pointed out, Reagan “saw Medicare as the advance wave of socialism, which would ‘invade every area of freedom in this country.’ ”

Does Ms. Palin agree with that Looney Tunes notion? Or was this just another case of the aw-shucks, darn-right, I’m-just-a-hockey-mom governor of Alaska mouthing something completely devoid of meaning?

Here’s Ms. Palin during the debate: “Say it ain’t so, Joe! There you go pointing backwards again ... Now, doggone it, let’s look ahead and tell Americans what we have to plan to do for them in the future. You mentioned education, and I’m glad you did. I know education you are passionate about with your wife being a teacher for 30 years, and God bless her. Her reward is in heaven, right?”

If Governor Palin didn’t like a question, or didn’t know the answer, she responded as though some other question had been asked. She made no bones about this, saying early in the debate: “I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you want to hear.”

The problem with Ms. Palin’s candidacy is that John McCain might actually win this election, and then if something terrible happened, the country could be left with little more than an exclamation point as president.

After Ms. Palin had woven one of her particularly impenetrable linguistic webs, Joe Biden turned to the debate’s moderator, Gwen Ifill, and said: “Gwen, I don’t know where to start.”

Of course he didn’t know where to start because Ms. Palin’s words don’t mean anything. She’s all punctuation.

This is such a serious moment in American history that it’s hard to believe that someone with Ms. Palin’s limited skills could possibly be playing a leadership role. On the day before the debate, the commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, made an urgent appeal for more troops, saying the additional “boots on the ground,” as well as more helicopters and other vital equipment, were “needed as quickly as possible.”

The morning after the debate, the Labor Department announced that the employment situation in the U.S. had deteriorated even more than experts had expected. The nation lost nearly 160,000 jobs in September, more than double the monthly losses in July and August.

Conditions are probably worse than even those numbers indicate because the government’s statistics do not yet reflect the response of employers to the credit crisis that has taken such a hold in the last few weeks.

Where is the evidence that Governor Palin even understands these complex and enormously challenging problems? During the debate she twice referred to General McKiernan as “McClellan.” Neither Ms. Ifill nor Senator Biden corrected her.

But after Senator Biden suggested that John McCain’s answer to the nation’s energy problems was to “drill, drill, drill,” Ms. Palin promptly pointed out, as if scoring a point, that “the chant is ‘Drill, baby, drill!’ ”

How’s that for perspective? The credit markets are frozen. Our top general in Afghanistan is dialing 911. Americans are losing jobs by the scores of thousands. And Sarah Palin is making sure we know that the chant is “drill, baby, drill!” not “drill, drill, drill.”

John McCain has spent most of his adult life speaking of his love for his country. Maybe he sees something in Sarah Palin that most Americans do not. Maybe he is aware of qualities that lead him to believe she’d be as steady as Franklin Roosevelt in guiding the U.S. through a prolonged economic downturn. Maybe she’d be as wise and prudent in a national emergency as John Kennedy was during the Cuban missile crisis.

Maybe Senator McCain has reason to believe that it would not be the most colossal of errors to put Ms. Palin a heartbeat away from the presidency.

He’s got just four weeks to share that insight with the rest of us.

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Obama Campaign Clears its Va. Voter Registration Goal

Voters rally for Obama at Ball Circle University of Mary Washington in Fredericksburg, Va., on Sept. 27, 2008. (Nikki Kahn/The Washington Post)

By Alec MacGillis
With his decision to pull out of Michigan, John McCain will have more resources to devote to holding the Republican states he needs get to 270 electoral votes, including Virginia. And -- would you look at that -- just yesterday McCain and the Republican National Committee announced the opening of 12 new offices in the Old Dominion, giving the campaign a total of 21 offices in the state.

But the Virginia Board of Elections today posted new numbers showing the GOP nominee facing an unusually challenging climate in the state, which George Bush won with 54 percent of the vote in 2004. In September, the board reports, 106,150 people registered to vote in the state; combined with deaths and people moving out of the state, the net increase for the month was 101,737.

That is more than double the number of new registrants in August, and it places Barack Obama's campaign ahead its goal of making sure 150,000 Virginians got added to the rolls in the months since the primaries ended (on top of the 142,000 Virginians who registered in the first five months of the year).

As it now stands, there have been 163,000 voters added to the rolls during the general election period, for a total of 305,000 new voters since the start of the year. And a few days still remain before the Oct. 6 registration deadline. That compares with 210,000 new voters who were added between the start of 2004 and Oct. 1 of that year.

There is no way of knowing which way the new voters lean politically, since Virginia's registrations are nonpartisan. But one can speculate about their inclinations based on where they're coming from -- and a disproportionate number of the new voters reside in Democratic strongholds.

Roughly 30,000 of the 106,000 new voters registered in September reside in just six pro-Kerry cities and counties, with many more living in other jurisdictions that voted for the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004. More than 11,000 new voters signed up in Fairfax County, more than 5,000 signed up in Richmond, more than 4,500 signed up in Arlington, more than 3,500 in both Norfolk and Newport News, and nearly 2,500 in Alexandria.

The Obama campaign has been estimating that 80 percent of the new voters are Obama supporters, and that they'll turn out at a rate of about 75 percent, which the campaign predicts could mean about a 1.75 percent boost on Election Day. That's enough to make a difference in a close race -- but not nearly enough to close the full 8 point gap that Bush enjoyed.

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