Oh noes, McCrankypants! Your "base" is tuning you out, just like the rest of America. That's gotta hurt.
Last night, the McCain campaign issued an announcement, dutifully reported upon by Jonathan Martin of the Politico and elsewhere, that McCain would have "big news" in the morning.
The blogosphere was a-twitter. Would it be that Sarah Palin is stepping down? Or that McCain was finally making public his medical records? Or maybe that he would be REALLY maverick-y and declare with his mortgage bailout plan his official independence from the Republican Party? Oh, the possibilities were endless!
But sadly, the reality was far more humdrum. Jonathan Martin, this morning:
That "news" in the morning
Sure enough, it's Bill Ayers.
The McCain campaign is launching a web ad accusing Obama of trying to hide his ties to the 60s-era radical.
I'm loving the use of quotes around news. Another lame-ass attempt, debunked everywhere already, to tie Obama to Ayers. The McCain camp spent God knows how much money to produce a one and a half minute ad that no one cares about (including rightwingers like Michael Smerconish), that makes them look desperate and flailing and the best part, Martin and Mark Halperin over at Time didn't even bother to link up in their coverage.
My friends, that's not the work of a winning campaign. Steve Benen shows how the McCain camp really doesn't want to go there:
The web ad comes about 24 hours after top McCain campaign aides seemingly took the Ayers "issue" (I use the word loosely) off the table.
But as long as we're on the subject, McCain's associations continue to be increasingly interesting as well. We've known for a while that McCain has befriended a convicted felon who advised his supporters on how best to shoot federal officials, used the money of a convicted criminal to help buy a house, befriended a radical anti-Catholic televangelist, befriended a radical anti-American televangelist, was a long-time associate of Charles Keating, and hired for his campaign the publisher of a Confederate nostalgia magazine who has described Nelson Mandela as a "terrorist." This week, we also learned about McCain serving on the board of the extremist U.S. Council for World Freedom, where he worked alongside Iran-Contra figures, and a eugenics researcher studying "white superiority."
