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Will the second of three presidential debates (hosted by NBC's Tom Brokaw at 9 p.m.) be edgier than the first?
"From now until Election Day it might get kinda rough," Sarah Palin promised yesterday at a rally in south Florida.
McCain, in Albuquerque, delivered a tough, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" speech
So, I guess, here we go.
Fall behind? Go on the attack.
Forget the voters. Forget the issues. Self-serve up the same old stuff.
You might not see it tonight. The format is town meeting. And since most questions come from voters, there's at least a chance for a real discussion.
But there's nonessential stuff (basically old baggage) sneaking into a campaign that ought to be centered solely on how best to fix the economy.
Palin's talking about '60s Weather Underground radical William Ayers, now a University of Illinois at Chicago professor, who in the mid-'90s held a campaign event for Obama.
So Palin says Obama's been, "Pallin' around with terrorists."
The Obama-Ayers connection (they lived in the same neighborhood and served on the board of a Chicago nonprofit foundation to help the indigent) was a brief distraction during the primaries.
Reprising it now seems desperate, even if it carries some campaign value.
"On one hand it's an old story," says Notre Dame political-science professor Darren Davis. "On the other hand there are uncommitted white independents and white Democrats, the same [Hillary] Clinton voters this had resonance with in the primaries. . . . I think the McCain campaign thinks there's still mileage here."
Do you, I ask?
"Oh, yeah," says Davis.
Obama's counterpunch is another walk down memory lane. He even put out a minidocumentary on the topic yesterday.
He's reminding voters of the "Keating Five," the name given a late-'80s fiscal scandal involving five senators, including McCain, the only Republican.
Back then, McCain met with federal regulators on behalf of pal and patron Charles Keating, who was subsequently jailed for fraud in (at the time) one of the largest savings-and-loan failures in U.S. history.
The Senate Ethics Committee found that three of the five senators had acted improperly and formally reprimanded one. The committee said McCain had exercised "poor judgment."
So Obama can't be trusted for his ties to terrorists.
And McCain helped start the present economic nightmare.
Can this stuff work?
"I don't know how that's going to play," says a Georgetown University associate professor of politics, Diana Owen. "The public might be less receptive than in the past to negative messages and may force the candidates to be more substantive."
Princeton politics professor Larry Bartels calls hitting Obama with Ayers "a hard sell, given voters' more pressing concerns and Sen. McCain's own much-burnished image as a man of honor above the partisan fray."
Bartels notes that McCain already said Obama's controversial former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is not a legitimate campaign issue.
Now, I get going after Obama on a personal level.
He's the new kid, more personally suspect than a senator who's been in Congress a quarter of a century.
Plus, McCain trails in polls, as he has since voters started paying attention to issues, especially the economy.
Four polls say Obama's up by 4 to 9 points with just one month to go.
So McCain needs a campaign change in order to beat the candidate of change.
And I get Obama striking back: He won't be "swift-boated," won't take fire without returning fire.
But the way things are - the low state of the economy, the high level of voter interest - it would be nice if our politicians rose to the occasion rather than race to the bottom. *
Send e-mail to baerj@phillynews.com.
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