Beyond The Palin.(The Talk of the Town)(Sarah Palin)

Format isn't everything. John McCain's campaign specialty has been the "town hall," where the candidate wanders the stage, microphone in hand, answering questions from ordinary citizens and bantering with them. So his staff was happy that his second debate with Barack Obama, which took place last Tuesday evening, in Nashville, Tennessee, was structured according to his favorite style. McCain's town meetings have been one-man shows, based on a relationship between candidate and audience that falls somewhere between that of a celebrity to his fans and that of a king to his subjects--one important man and a roomful of the little people. But the dynamic changed when a second important man, particularly one who was elegantly calm and self-assured, was added to the mix. Afterward, in CNN's poll of independent debate-watchers, fifty-four per cent thought Obama came out on top, while thirty per cent picked McCain as the winner. A congenial set of rules, it seems, can't offset a talented opponent, much less a worldwide financial panic.

The Nashville town hall was an interlude of comparative comity, sandwiched between moldy slices of slander. Early in the general-election campaign, Obama was accused, for example, of favoring "painful tax increases on working American families," when in fact his tax hike would apply only to family incomes of more than a quarter million dollars a year. Perhaps that could be dismissed as a routine political stretcher. But Obama was also portrayed as a libertine who demanded that kindergartners be exposed to explicit descriptions of sexual intercourse (when in fact he proposed only to teach them to recognize inappropriate advances) and as a sexist boor who called the Republican Vice-Presidential nominee a pig (when in fact he used a common simile that his opponent had a habit of using himself). None of this quite amounted to suggesting that the Democrat is a traitor or a facilitator of terror. That came after the financial crisis began and Obama took a small but persistent lead in the opinion polls.

Early this month, McCain moved nearly his entire advertising budget into negative territory. But "negative" hardly does justice to the mendacity of the campaign of vilification that bracketed Nashville. "Barack Obama has said that all we're doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians," Sarah Palin said the week before. "Such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause." McCain's wife, Cindy--who, in May, had said, "My husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all"--told a rally last week, "The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son while he was serving sent a cold chill through my body." A McCain television spot summed up the line of attack:

Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are [Obama's voice] "just air-raiding villages and killing civilians." How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals. Too risky for America.

Here is what Obama actually said, fourteen months ago: "We've got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there." He was calling for reinforcements, not casting aspersions. And, as McCain must know, the one Senate vote on which the charge of defunding the troops is based has a mirror image. In May of 2007, Obama voted against a troop-funding bill because it did not include steps toward withdrawal from Iraq; two months earlier, McCain had voted against one because it did. In neither case did their parliamentary maneuverings pose the slightest risk to the life of a single soldier.

Enter Bill Ayers, the former Weatherman, now a college professor ...