negative campaigning

ThinkProgress has this great catch.
During an interview with NBC’s Meredith Vieira on “Today” this morning, former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney, appearing on behalf of Sen. John McCain, didn’t exactly offer a ringing endorsement of the McCain campaign.

There’s a new meme in the presidential race: The Internet is helping expose dirty tricks, enhance campaign accountability and punish the purveyors of dog-whistle sleaze.
Such web luminaries as Arianna Huffington and Micah Sifry pushed that argument this week. The Obama campaign agrees.
On Friday, Sen. Barack Obama’s new-media office launched an initiative to identify and expose [...]

Former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani is establishing himself as the Luca Brasi to Sen. John McCain’s Vito Corleone.
Whenever the situation calls for a hit job, there’s only one goon to which the don turns.
TPM reports Giuliani has lent his voice to what is perhaps the lowest of the McCain campaign’s robocalls — it portrays [...]

The McCain campaign’s robocalls have drawn a lot of attention over the past couple of days.
The phone calls play one of several automated messages about Sen. Barack Obama and are being made in swing states across the country, including Colorado, North Carolina and Virginia.
The messages include a slew of dishonest accusations, among them:

I genuinely would love to write something that had absolutely nothing to do with William Ayers.
But, unfortunately, the McCain campaign still thinks Ayers is the single most important campaign issue — even though its own spokespeople agree the American people don’t care. This morning, it released a nearly two-minute video linking Sen. Barack Obama to [...]

Is Bill Ayers the new Kevin Bacon?

In its newest TV ad, titled “Hypo,” the McCain campaign labels Sen. Barack Obama a “hypocritical” liar.
I’ll pause a moment to allow the irony — some might call it hypocrisy — of that sentence to sink in.

Sen. Obama’s latest campaign video, “Keating Economics: John McCain and the Making of a Financial Crisis,” features William Black, the former deputy director of the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, who attended a meeting, in April 1987, of McCain, four other senators and Black’s boss at the time, Edwin Gray.
The “Keating Five” scandal became the [...]

When the McCain campaign announced this weekend that it would start attacking Sen. Barack Obama via guilt by association, peddling smears about people he barely knows, I thought the tack would lead to the Keating Five.  But I didn’t know it would happen this quickly.