The Wright time

Entering the last month of the campaign, trailing consistently in the polls, the McCain campaign has announced they are going negative in a story in the Washington Post (something Karl Rove only could shake his head at -- announcing it, not doing it). Back in spring, McCain had asked the NC GOP to pull an ad making Rev. Wright an issue, saying that that wasn't the kind of campaign he was going to run -- he was going to run a "respectful" campaign. This weekend, his running mate told Bill Kristol that Wright was someone the McCain-Palin campaign should be talking about, and an interesting op-ed ran in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, owned by Richard Mellon Scaife and previously home to numerous articles alleging that Clinton aide Vince Foster was murdered and that the Clintons were involved.

The column begins by praising Obama's Philadelphia speech on race and recounting its argument about the understandable, yet destructive consequences of long-held anger and bitterness over racial matters. It seems a strange choice of a column topic, until you get to the pivot point in the argument:

clipped from www.pittsburghlive.com "At times, that anger," said Obama, "is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines" -- and to gin up the flow of money from the pews. "That anger is not always productive," Obama asserted. "Indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition." Why, then, given this call to reject "a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism," did Obama establish a long-lasting working relationship with unrepentant former terrorist William Ayers?

The claims about Obama's connections to Ayers (which have been established to be fairly superficial) implicitly are used to justify reminding voters of Reverend Wright. We'll have to wit to see whether this reveals itself as a strategy of the McCain campaign, but given Palin's comments to Kristol -- who ought to be getting paid by McCain-Palin rather than the Times -- it seems likely that "God damn America!" will be returning soon to a television near you.