So McCain and Palin have been trotting out the asinine canard about Bill Ayers; the slur has always been a little ridiculous, appealing to a convoluted guilt-by-colocation hermeneutic and a kind of racism which is politically dead. ‘Barack Hussein Obama, ergo wooga-booga Mahometan’ aims for a relatively open and well-understood set of fears, but does so in such an obvious and malignant way that it’s actually impossible to do without it backfiring. The Ayers slur, as much as it’s racially charged, relies on associating any politically active black man with radical Marxism - a well-pedigreed bit of right-wing hysteria evolving from the converse, back when being black was regarded as inherently offensive and ’socialist’ wasn’t automatically abusive. It seems likely that Bill Penn, in pushing the Ayers-radical storyline, chose fairly shrewdly - it lacks even the most basic corraborating detail (the closest anyone can associate the two is sitting on a board together with Republicans, independents, and non-political figures to improve education), and it appeals to something far-fetched enough that someone would really have to be desperate to vote against a black man to connect the dots on it.

The Democratic caucus, owing to a hypertrophied sense of conservative perfidy and backwardness, is profoundly reluctant to accept people for a number of reasons. Feingold would face serious difficulties if he were the only challenger in the field; Frank would be turned down in favor of even some nonentity like Warner, and God forbid we found an actual Arab. The Bradley Effect seems to be much more prominent internally than externally.

But whatever people might think of black people in the aggregate - and it’s true that the conservative part of the electorate is fairly backwards about this - any but the most lurid racists have internalized the meritocratic idea central to America sufficiently that even groups who can be vilified in polite society could still make their way into office. Between that and its relative obscurity, attempting to prove that Obama was the devious protege of the Weathermen by pointing to a picture of him and saying “See? Black!” doesn’t work for anyone who could be expected to vote for a black man to begin with.

All of this has occurred to the Bush/McCain electoral team; what their using the Ayers meme indicates is that their opposition research has turned up nothing and they’re beginning to go into a shrieking panic. The slur, unsurprisingly, gains nothing by Palin’s usual half-baked country-frying; I’m not confident that ‘palling around’ is ever even used the way she meant it, but who knows.

At this point, McCain is down no less than 5 points and possibly as much as 12, he needs to win not only every state currently voting for him but every state leaning towards Obama - especially a seemingly unwinnable Florida and an increasingly hostile Ohio and Virginia - and all he’s got left up his sleeve is a shotgun wedding. This is what it means that he’s throwing shit like this up in the air - he’s having Palin shout about Ayers because it’s less embarrassing than anything else she could do, and that’s saying a lot.