McCain, Obama mudslinging grips campaign

WASHINGTON (AP) – Mudslinging — initiated over the weekend by Republican John McCain’s campaign — gathered intensity in the presidential race Monday as Democrat Barack Obama resurrected his opponent’s links to a financial scandal two decades ago.

The heightened attacks set a more hostile tone for the race ahead of Tuesday’s presidential debate, the second of three.

Obama, reacting to Republican allegations that he “palled around” with a 1960s radical, fired back with a Web video about McCain’s role in the Keating Five savings and loan debacle early in the Arizona senator’s Senate career. His role in that scandal earned him a rebuke for poor judgment from Senate colleagues.

The Obama campaign was e-mailing a 13-minute Web “documentary” about McCain’s involvement with convicted thrift owner Charles Keating, calling the episode “a window into McCain’s economic past, present and future.”

With a grave financial crisis dragging the 72-year-old Republican lower in the polls with just four weeks remaining until the Nov. 4 election, the McCain campaign had telegraphed its intention to turn the screws on Obama and declared it wanted to turn the page on the economic turmoil.

On Tuesday, Obama told reporters McCain was not paying enough attention to the economic crisis gripping the country, emphasizing that he could not “imagine anything more important to talk about” than Americans’ losing their jobs, health care and homes.

An aide to McCain recently said his campaign would like to shift the presidential race’s focus away from the economy, which has been a better issue for Democrats than Republicans. Since then, McCain’s running mate Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin has been questioning Obama’s character based on his association with an incendiary pastor and a 1960s radical turned college professor.

McCain continues to discuss economic conditions, but Obama says he needs to offer better and more specific remedies.

The fierce skirmishing broke out after Palin claimed during appearances over the weekend that Obama sees America as so imperfect “that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country,” a reference to 1960s-era radical Bill Ayers.

Obama and Ayers do not know each other well although they live in the same Chicago neighborhood, have served on a charity board together and Ayers hosted a meet-the-candidate event when Obama first ran for state office in the mid-1990s.

On Monday, Palin expanded her attack on Obama’s character to include his relationship with an incendiary former pastor as well as his ties to Ayers.

In the process, Palin toned down her description of the Obama-Ayers relationship after her weekend remarks were criticized as exaggerated, but at the same time she embarked on a discussion of Obama’s relationship with his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., which Republican presidential candidate John McCain had signaled he did not want to be a part of his campaign.

In an interview with conservative The New York Times columnist William Kristol published Monday, the Alaska governor said there should be more discussion about Wright, Obama’s pastor of 20 years at Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. The Democratic candidate denounced Wright and severed ties with the church last spring after videotapes surfaced showing Wright making anti-American and anti-Semitic comments from the pulpit.

Wright had appeared to be off limits for the McCain campaign ever since McCain himself condemned the North Carolina Republican Party in April for an ad that called Obama “too extreme” because Wright was his pastor. McCain asked the party to take down the ad and said, “I’m making it very clear, as I have a couple of times in the past, that there’s no place for that kind of campaigning, and the American people don’t want it.”

When Kristol pressed Palin about Wright, she replied, “I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country.”

Story Continues →