With a month to go, campaign gets personal

As Barack Obama pulls ahead of John McCain in the opinion polls, and the two candidates prepare for their second TV debate on Tuesday, each camp has been turning up the heat this weekend. Character attacks rather than policy differences look like ruling the agenda for the remaining month of campaigning.

McCain's vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin spent much of the weekend in California attacking Obama over his links to Bill Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, the radical group which waged a violent campaign against the Vietnam War in the 1960s. The Weathermen were blamed for a number of bombings in the US and the death of a San Francisco policeman.

Palin, doing her best impersonation yet of the "pitbull" she referred to in her acceptance speech a month ago, described Obama as someone who saw the US "as being so imperfect... he is palling around with terrorists who would target their own country". She was referring to the fact that Obama served on a charity board several years ago with Ayers, who is now a professor at the University of Illinois.

Although media reports have concluded that Obama and Ayers do not have a close relationship, Palin drew attention to the fact that Ayers hosted a small gathering at his house for Obama in 1995 when the Democrat was kicking off his political career.

Obama accused the McCain-Palin camp of launching a smear campaign in an effort to reverse their slide in the polls and cover up McCain's "erratic" behaviour in the face of the Wall Street crisis. Obama was a child when the Weathermen were active and Obama is known to have publicly denounced Ayers' radical past. Nevertheless, Palin returned to the subject - and hinted at more 'revelations' to come - when she told a fundraising event on Sunday that Americans didn't know "the real Barack Obama".

Obama has hit back by delving into McCain's connections to Charles Keating, a convicted savings and loan owner whose actions two decades ago triggered a Senate ethics investigation which involved McCain as one of the 'Keating Five'. Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor, announcing the release of a web video about McCain and Keating, to be sent out to Obama supporters, said McCain's involvement with Keating was "a window into McCain's economic past, present and future".

Obama supporters had warned McCain that if Palin continued to pursue the Ayers allegation the Republicans would regret it. Rahm Emanuel, a Democratic congressman from Chicago, said: "If we are going to go down this road, you know, Barack Obama was eight years old, somehow responsible for Bill Ayers. At 58, John McCain was associating with Charles Keating."

The Obama camp has also launched a new television ad, due to start playing nationally on cable TV today, which accuses 72-year-old McCain of being: "Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy." The commercial picks up on McCain's response over the past fortnight to the $700bn rescue plan as it went through Congress.

On a lighter note, before Palin left California on Sunday she managed to make a George Bush-style geographical blunder, referring to Afghanistan as "our neighboring country". Speaking at a fundraiser in San Francisco, she praised US troops for "fighting terrorism and protecting us and our democratic values". She went on: "They are also building schools for the Afghan children so that there is hope and opportunity in our neighboring country of Afghanistan."

In a later speech in Omaha, Nebraska, Palin tried to make light of the slip by acknowledging that Tina Fey, the actress who has been doing impressions of Palin on Saturday Night Live, was bound to use it as new material. "I was just trying to give Tina Fey more material - job security for Saturday Night Live," Palin said.

FIRST POSTED OCTOBER 6, 2008