The Gloves come off

In an election that was being fought between two men who have put huge amounts of efforts into talking up their bipartisan skills, it was perhaps disappointing to see the slew of negative campaigning that emerged in the past week or so. Both candidates have tried to smear the other, most notably when Sarah Palin used Barack Obama's tenuous association with Bill Ayers, a former founder of the Weather Underground who is now a respected college professor, to claim that Obama was "palling around with terrorists". However, Obama has also shot back with some ads of his own that both tarnish John McCain and fail what Karl Rove once referred to as "the 100% truth test".

In McCain's case, it is perhaps more understandable. He is quite clearly out of his depth on the issues side of things. As the economy takes centre stage to an ever greater degree, McCain's decades at the centre of the foreign policy apparatus look less important. At a rough guess, every point the Dow drops gains Obama about 2,500 votes, and unless McCain can somehow convince voters that he, an admiral's son married to a millionaire, understands their problems and can deal with them more effectively than Obama, it will be exceedingly difficult for him to win in November. This becomes even more important when the swing states are taken into account. McCain has now given up in Michigan, a state John Kerry only carried by three points in 2004. He is now having to defend once-solid leads in both Ohio and Indiana, which have been hit hard by economic problems in the past few years.

As a result, John McCain has decided to take an alternative route to the presidency, namely by trying to paint Barack Obama as unfit for command. He is not the first to do so, and was himself on the receiving end of one of the most vitriolic smear campaigns of modern times in the 2000 South Carolina primaries. However, it is certainly a huge disappointment that a man who has sold himself as an old-style patriot, willing to cross the aisle when necessary, has resorted to the win-at-any-cost methods that came to define much of the George W. Bush presidency. There is also a danger for McCain that, by following these policies, he may well have trouble breaking free from the association with Bush, his most persistent millstone.

Another potential pitfall of McCain's tactics is that they leave him open to being attacked himself. Obama can now piously claim that he did not wish to engage in negative campaigning, but has been forced into it, and unleash a barrage of attack ads. McCain's family, his association with the Keating scandal in the 1980s, and perhaps most importantly his age, can now be considered targets, and McCain may not emerge unscathed.

Perhaps the biggest problem that McCain has is that his campaign may simply appear to many Americans to be a distraction from the problems America faces today. As the economy gets weaker, it will become more of an issue. Perhaps Obama's strongest card would be to stop any attacks on McCain's character, and simply brush off any attacks on his own as evidence that McCain cares more about the presidency than the economy. If Obama can paint himself as the natural leader, John McCain's already difficult task will become nearly impossible.