Attack Ads and Approval Ratings

This shouldn't come as a surprise, as it is now a little less than one month before the election, but the McCain campaign has stepped up its attacks on Barack Obama's character. In the past few days, the McCain campaign has made it very clear that they are hoping to "turn the page" on economic issues and focus on Obama as a person, as if the passing of the bailout package on Friday suddenly made people forget how dire their financial situations still are (indeed, the bailout did little for markets today, as the Dow falls below 10,000).

Sarah Palin this weekend started hitting Obama for his "relationship" with William Ayers, saying Obama has been "palling around with terrorists." Of course it's valid to question someone's political affiliations (even though, in this case, I think the relationship is dubious at best), but if I were the McCain campaign, I would be careful who's calling out whose character. This week in Rolling Stone, there is a scathing biography of John McCain that calls into question his character and judgement, as well as his involvement in the Keating Five. This is an article from Rolling Stone, so you have to take things with a grain of salt (aside: I don't subscribe to the whole "liberal media bias" thing, but I know the difference between Fox News and Mother Jones). But even allowing for a little bias, this article calls into question a lot about McCain as a person, as a leader, as a thinker, which, to me, is much more relevant to his ability to be President then a member of the Weather Underground holding a small-fundraiser for you in his living room, 30 years after the fact. No one is perfect, but it's the relevance of our imperfections that matters.

Besides that fact that the country has real problems it actually cares about at the moment and voters want to hear about the issues, these attacks on Obama for Ayers and Reverend Wright won't work. You know why? Because they haven't. These are stories we heard for months in the primaries; they're old news. Not only that, but the country is clearly not interested in what will be seen as another gimmick by the floundering McCain campaign. Check out McCain's favorable ratings:Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com says: "What's interesting is that, with the exception of the past couple of weeks, McCain's and Obama's ratings have been fairly strongly correlated, tending to rise and fall together. This is not to say that negative campaigning doesn't work -- it sometimes does -- but it works at diminished efficiency, because you may be giving back 50 cents on the dollar by harming your own approval scores."

So I say, good luck trying to bring down Obama, John. You're just bringing yourself (and your chances of winning) down with it.

More: Thanks TPM for drawing my attention to Joe Klein's piece today. "I'm of two minds about how to deal with the McCain campaign's further descent into ugliness. Their strategy is simple: you throw crap against a wall and then giggle as the media try to analyze the putresence in a way that conveys a sense of balance: "Well, it is bull-pucky, but the splatter pattern is interesting..." which, of course, only serves to get your perverse message out. I really don't want to be a part of that."