In the wake of a slew of polls that show the race in the Grand Canyon State tightening in recent weeks, Talking Points Memo reports that several of its Arizona readers reported receiving a McCain campaign robocall today.

McCain’s robocall, which was played to us over the phone by Mary Joe Bartel, a retiree who lives south of Tucson, attacks Obama as unprepared to defend the country from terrorism, singling out Joe Biden’s recent remarks about the likelihood of Obama being tested by an international crisis early in his first term.

Here’s the script:

I’m calling for John McCain and the RNC because Barack Obama is so dangerously inexperienced, his running mate Joe Biden just said, he invites a major international crisis that he will be unprepared to handle alone.

If Democrats win full control of government, they will want to give civil rights to terrorists and talk unconditionally to dictators and state sponsors of terror. Barack Obama and his Democratic allies lack the experience and judgment to lead America. This call was paid for by the Republican National Committee and authorized by McCain-Palin 2008.

The news says a lot about the state of the McCain campaign. With Obama throwing money around like it’s his job, and with McCain struggling to keep pace, the campaign can hardly afford to redirect money from battleground states to go on the air with television or radio advertising in Arizona.

But McCain’s strategists must be at least somewhat concerned about McCain’s home-state standing, or they wouldn’t risk signaling weakness by taking this action. The robocalls will allow McCain to spread his message cheaply in Arizona. Unfortunately for him, it is highly questionable how effective the calls may be.

The McCain campaign is releasing memos saying the race is “functionally tied” — but its actions suggest McCainland is privately worried about the possibility of an electoral blowout.

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.