The McCain campaign is shifting entirely to negative advertising. In fact, McCain is so desperate that he's going to resume trying to tar Obama by linking him to more controversial Chicagoans, including people like William Ayres who are little more than acquaintances. It's not just that this tactic has sputtered out in the past, and holds little chance of success anyway when so many voters are worried about the economy and other serious issues. That would be indication enough that McCain is at a loss about how to turn his campaign around.

More remarkably, the new tactic practically invites Obama to respond by raising an issue he has so far assiduously avoided: John and Cindy McCain's close association with the late felon Charles Keating. Keating is the elephant in the room neither campaign wants to mention. If Obama decides it's finally time to remind voters about McCain's record in the Keating Five scandal, McCain will probably lose his cool once and for all and in any case it torpedoes his elaborate self-presentation as a maverick reformer.

Here's how the Washington Post describes McCain's new tactic:

"We're going to get a little tougher," a senior Republican operative said, indicating that a fresh batch of television ads is coming. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here," said the operative, who was not authorized to discuss strategy and spoke on the condition of anonymity...

McCain's only positive commercial, called "Original Mavericks," has largely been taken off the air, according to Evan Tracey of the Campaign Media Analysis Group, which tracks political ads...

Two other top Republicans said the new ads are likely to hammer the senator from Illinois on his connections to convicted Chicago developer Antoin "Tony" Rezko and former radical William Ayres, whom the McCain campaign regularly calls a domestic terrorist because of his acts of violence against the U.S. government in the 1960s...

They noted that Obama has run television commercials for months linking McCain to lobbyists and hinting at a lack of personal ethics -- an allegation that particularly rankles McCain, aides said.

There's precious little ammunition there for McCain to work with, as the New York Times found when it looked into exaggerated allegations about Obama's links to Ayres. Besides, arguing for guilt by association usually is pretty damned silly. We all have neighbors, co-workers, acquaintances, family and friends whose opinions on controversial topics sometimes make us cringe. And almost none of us bother to vet the personal histories of all our associates. It's hard for such attacks to gain traction unless at least one of the people has gained substantially through the association. After more than half a year of these attacks on Obama, nobody has produced plausible evidence that his associations with Rezko and Ayres led to any nefarious favors being done. It's a logical dead-end leading to a big "So what?".

But I think it also probably leads the Obama campaign finally to play one of the trump cards it has held onto, presumably for just such a situation. John McCain's shameless association with businessman Charles Keating, in which he accepted free trips to resorts and intervened with bank regulators to go easy in an investigation of Keating's fraudulent banks, astonishingly has been absent from political debate this year. Less egregious corruption on behalf of Keating by four of McCain's colleagues in the Senate destroyed their careers. But by contrast McCain has spun a myth about himself, that the Keating scandal – in which he still denies any wrongdoing – made him determined to become a paragon of rectitude in politics. It is the very same myth of redemption that McCain spun about how his suffering as a POW led him to abandon his feckless lifestyle and devote himself to public service. McCain obviously likes this myth of rebirth through suffering, otherwise he wouldn't keep applying it to episodes in his life. The problem is that it makes no sense. If he became a serious person in the 1970s, why did he continue to carouse, have extramarital affairs, and then become involved to his shame with Charles Keating? Why did he need to remake himself a second time?

The McMyth is pure malarky, that's why. He's never been the straight-talker he likes to praise himself for. I can say that from personal experience. When I encountered McCain in 1993, his reputation as a phony preceded him. He lived right down to it, as it happened, lying out of both sides of his mouth at the same time first in a closed meeting and then to reporters. It's just one episode in a long train of reprehensible activity.

I do not see how McCain can gain now if the public were to take a look at the airbrushing of his ugly history dating back to the 1980s, especially his and Cindy's friendship and business associations with Charles Keating. It's one of several truly ugly episodes in McCain's life that Obama so far has shown extraordinary patience in not exploiting. If Obama responds once again to another round of McCain's harsh personal attacks without dropping the Keating bomb, then Democrats may justifiably complain about political malpractice.

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