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.

But when Vieira asked him — three times — whether he thought McCain was running a “dignified” campaign, Romney refused to agree:

VIEIRA: So, let me ask you, would you characterize John McCain’s campaign as dignified and honest?

ROMNEY: Well, what I’d characterize the entire campaign as is extraordinarily negative on the part of Barack Obama. […]

VIEIRA: So you think his campaign was dignified?

ROMNEY: Well, I think it’s going to come down to this, and I think that is, who is going to be able to keep America safe and who is it that’s going to add jobs. […]

VIEIRA: Governor, not to beat a dead horse here, but once again, do you believe that the campaign was dignified?

ROMNEY: Was it dignified? It was presidential.

So according to Romney, presidential and dignified are not necessarily synonymous.

Note to future campaign reporters: Please be sure to ask Romney to clarify his view on this in 2012.

Here’s the video:

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 any last-minute, below-the-radar attacks on the Democratic presidential nominee. The web portal, Radar.BarackObama.com, tracks attacks and anonymous robocalls, and solicits reports from supporters around the country, “anchor[ing]” an “expansive campaign to push back on McCain’s unceasing negativity,” according to a campaign aide.  (The campaign is also touting offline pushback in key states, pointing to recent events in Missouri, Ohio, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Indiana and West Virginia.)

To be sure, Obama’s aides have been countering attacks during the whole campaign, online and off, including on another open-source portal, FightTheSmears.com. The new portal is distinct, however, because it maps and measures Republican attacks, showing the public (and the media) exactly how much Republicans are relying on robocalls, mailers and attacks in the homestretch.  The site aims to expose every “toxic attack” designed “to quietly poison voters’ information with lies and fear tactics.”

A U.S. map provides an indictment of Sen. John McCain, the site contends, by displaying attacks “which are approved by the McCain campaign or its Republican partners” (emphasis in original). The map:

As it happens, TalkingPointsMemo, a site that has fused journalism and new-media activism, unveiled a similar map this week, titled “Flying Under The Radar: The Map of GOP Sleaze.”

In the new era of web-driven politics, nothing stays below the radar for long, which can pose a bigger problem for deceitful candidates. For months, McCain proudly lectured voters about how he runs honest, honorable campaigns. Yet new-media scrutiny has exposed his use of the same lies, smears and tricks that helped sour the nation on the Republican politics of Karl Rove.

For some voters, the revulsion with McCain’s last-minute smears may be especially acute, once they know that he is employing the very operatives who launched hateful, racist smears and lies about his family in 2000.  That is not only hypocritically dishonorable, by definition; it also smacks of an unseemly desperation.

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 Sen. Barack Obama as soft on crime. The call has been reported in Maine, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Ohio and Colorado.

In the message, Giuliani accuses Obama of opposing “mandatory jail sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers and murderers.” He goes on to say that, “It’s true, I read Obama’s words myself.”

Really, Rudy? Obama said he opposed mandatory prison for murderers and rapists?

TPM’s Greg Sargent suggests Giulaini is actually talking about Obama’s opposition to federal mandatory minimum prison sentences — a glaring omission of one word that completely changes the meaning of the statement.

Note that Rudy claims Obama “opposes mandatory prison sentences” for rapists and murders. Rudy is actually referring to Obama’s opposition to specific mandatory minimum sentences. By dropping the word “minimum,” he’s insinuating that Obama opposes mandatory prison sentences in general.

ABC News reported during the primaries that Obama said in 2004 that he would vote to abolish mandatory minimums for federal crimes:

“Mandatory minimums take too much discretion away from judges,” Obama said in an NAACP debate.

It is worth pointing out that few murderers, rapists or drug dealers are tried in federal court.

I put in a call to the McCain campaign press office seeking the exact Obama quote Giuliani cites in the robocall. I will update if and when the campaign responds.

This isn’t the first time that Giuliani has waded out into the mud. Earlier this month, he participated in a McCain campaign conference call that, by all appearances, was staged for the purpose of bringing up William Ayers — before McCain and Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin lost their bashfulness about mentioning Ayers themselves.

Those years Giuliani spent as a U.S. attorney, prosecuting organized crime cases, may have taught him a thing or two about being a thug.

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:

Obama “put Hollywood above America“; is not commited to winning the war on Terror; palled around with former Weatherman Bill Ayers; and voted to deny medical care to newborn babies who survive abortions.

Now that Sen. John McCain has decided to embrace this negative tactic, it’s worthwhile to recall some of the things he said during the 2000 GOP primaries — when he was the target of a vicious robocall effort run by Karl Rove on behalf of then-Gov. George W. Bush.

During a GOP primary debate in South Carolina in February 2000, McCain addressed robocalls. From the transcript:

MCCAIN: … so here’s what happened. We ran an ad that was a response ad. At a town hall meeting, a mother stood up and she said, “Sen. McCain, my son was 13 last year. We had a lot of trouble explaining things to him that went on in Washington.” She said, “Now he’s 14. He’s told me not long ago, ‘John McCain is my hero.’ He’s the man I want to be like.

“Well, last night he came into her room,” she said, “and he had tears in his eyes because he had answered the phone and even though he told the caller that he was 14, [the caller] said, ‘Do you know that John McCain is a liar, and a thief and cheat?’”

Well, that night I called my people together. I said, take down our response ad.

We’re running nothing but a positive campaign from now on. I committed to that, I promise that.

In a March 5, 2000, appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” McCain said he would never want to say, “I ran that kind of campaign.”

“I can’t say that, with the things that have happened. I’ll support the nominee of the party. I will support him, but I cannot say that things like that, with the Wyly brothers and the phone calls and the attack ads such as the one you just–it’s not… it’s not a campaign that I would run, and nor would I ever want to look back and say, ‘I ran that kind of campaign.’”

Congratulations, Sen. McCain. You’re running that kind of campaign.

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 the former Weatherman.

In his column today in The Washington Post, George Will lys bare the absurdity and desperation of Sen. John McCain’s cynical, last-ditch ploy:

Before Tuesday night’s uneventful event, gall was fueling what might be the McCain-Palin campaign’s closing argument. It is less that Obama has bad ideas than that Obama is a bad person.

This, McCain and his female Sancho Panza say, is demonstrated by bad associations Obama had in Chicago, such as with William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist. But the McCain-Palin charges have come just as the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing it is not paying for. Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts — telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans’ accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama’s Chicago associations seems surreal — or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, “like being savaged by a dead sheep.”

Ouch.

If you need more evidence for the shambles in which the McCain campaign finds itself, during an appearance on “The Colbert Report” last night, former Republican congressman and current MSNBC host Joe Scarborough declared “it’s too late” for McCain.

And in his latest campaign scorecard, Time’s Mark Halperin writes that “without a major change in the race’s dynamics, McCain has no clear path” to the 270 electoral votes needed to win the presidency.

It’s telling that McCain and Obama have slated rallies early next week in the historically red state of Virginia, where Obama has opened up a sizeable lead in recent polls. Politico reports that both candidates have invited special guests.

Hank “Are you ready for some football?” Williams Jr., is scheduled to open a McCain-Palin rally in Virginia Beach Monday.

Obama is expected to bring out the big guns Sunday at rallies in Richmond and Roanoke, with appearances by former President Bill Clinton, who will presumably remind voters of a time when the budget yielded surpluses and the economy was not in turmoil.

The next day, the McCain campaign will likely still be talking about Ayers.

It turns out that many political figures have tangential links to Ayers, including both major parties’ presidential nominees.  TWI’s Matt DeLong discussed McCain’s tie today, as reported in Time, and now the Democratic National Committee is emailing reporters with an item titled “Ayers Funder Tops List of McCain Endorsements.” The email flags this “key point” from a Huffington Post article:

Second on [McCain's endorsment] list … is Leonore Annenberg, currently the president and chairman of the Annenberg Foundation [and former] the “chief of protocol” at the State Department under President Reagan. If the last name sounds familiar, it’s because it also graces the name of the Chicago education board where Barack Obama and William Ayers sat in the room six times together.

Yes, it’s the politics of six degrees of separation. Kind of a mouthful, but this kind of pushback may help expose the absurdity of attacking senators — who interact with a lot of people — for their passing acquaintanceships.

I’ll pause a moment to allow the irony — some might call it hypocrisy — of that sentence to sink in.

PRODUCTION NOTES: Oh, where to begin?

The spot begins with a story that was reported a couple of weeks ago in Missouri. The story was about Obama’s Missouri “truth squad,” which is composed of numerous Missouri public officials, including some prosecutors and sheriffs. The squad’s purpose is to rapidly respond to false or misleading anti-Obama ads in the state.

Missouri Republicans quickly pointed to the presence of law enforcement officials on the squad as evidence that the Obama campaign intended to intimidate, or even lock up, people who criticized its candidate — and the story linked above appeared to confirm that.

Matt Blunt, the Republican governor, issued a statement condemning the truth squad as “scandalous beyond words.”

However, as ABC’s Jake Tapper reported,  John Mills, the reporter, subsequently clarified his story, saying that the truth squad would hold a news conference to call out misleading ads.

As for the rest of the McCain ad, it’s all fair game. There is no question that both candidates have made false claims about each other.

For McCain, however, to try to lay claim to the high road, at this late date, is more than a little absurd — especially after FactCheck.org called a McCain attack ad released yesterday “dishonorable” because of its distortions.

The real kicker is that McCain comes right out and says Obama “lied,” when he “promised better.”

Don’t forget that McCain daily promised through early summer to run an honorable campaign. So perhaps Obama did lie when he promised better, but so did McCain. Neither candidate has lived up to their early promises to run a different kind of campaign — and that’s a real shame.

It’s also the point of the ad. If McCain can convince voters that he hasn’t been the only candidate dragging the presidential campaign into the ditch, he might be able to gin up some sympathy for playing by the old rules.

But McCain’s operation developed a reputation for dishonesty early on, and such labels are hard to shake. By making William Ayers a campaign issue, and reviving Obama’s association with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, as Gov. Sarah Palin has done, the McCain campaign risks resurrecting its rep for dishonesty.

Obama immediately hit back with Charles Keating. It may have been a smart move, politically, but it also played right into McCain’s hands by showing that Obama is willing to play that game too.

The “Keating Five” scandal became the symbol of the collapse of the nation’s savings and loan industry and the ensuing $124 billion government bailout.

Black and Gray testified before the Senate Ethics Committee in 1990 that McCain, along with Sens. Dennis DeConcin (D-Ariz.), Alan Cranston (D-Calif.), John Glenn (D-Ohio) and Don Riegle (D-Mich.), pressured Gray to relax an investment regulation opposed by Charles Keating. The committee ruled that McCain exercised “poor judgment” for his role in the affair.

Black, now an associate professor of economics and law at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, told me that McCain has long opposed regulation of the financial markets.

“McCain has gotten this stuff wrong from the beginning,” Black said. “One his first acts as a member of the House was trying to stop the re-regulation of the thrift industry” by opposing efforts by regulators to increase capital reserves and reduce the amount of money thrifts could invest, as well as other revisions sought by regulators.

With the economy heading into recession, Obama is bringing up McCain’s unsavory ties to Keating in an attempt to focus the blame for the current financial crisis on the man who was in the eye of the last financial storm to plague the nation the nation–the S&L crisis.

It’s a strategy that could work.

The Obama campaign swung into action immediately.  By the time the Sunday news shows were taping, Democratic surrogates were hitting McCain with opposition research on his associations with extremist, racist groups (Begala) and the Keating Five (Emanuel). Today, of course, camp Obama is pushing a new Keating Economics website, which begins streaming a documentary about McCain’s Keating problem at noon.

Obama’s campaign has never pushed the Keating button before, so this attack carries an original punch–and is clearly salient given the current financial crisis. Because the scandal involved McCain’s actions in public service, it is more likely to arise during the remaining two debates.

McCain’s dredging up of Bill Ayers, in contrast, is not only old news but has no link to anything Obama has done in public life.  Patrick Ruffini, a Republican operative who worked on Bush’s reelection campaign, said today that McCain’s Ayers attacks are so old that airing them now “appears desperate.”

Desperate and risky — given the corrupt skeletons in McCain’s closet.

For more on what The Keating Five says about McCain’s candidacy, check out “Did McCain Learn From the S&L Crisis,” a September TWI article by John Dougherty.