BARACK OBAMA and John McCain meet in Nashville tonight for the second of three presidential debates as the two campaigns exchange accusations about each candidate’s past associations.
Tonight’s debate at Belmont University will be a town hall style meeting with questions posed by undecided voters, a format that often favours Mr McCain.
It comes, however, after three weeks of plunging poll numbers for the Republican, who announced last week that he is pulling out of Michigan, a key battleground state, to target resources on states President George Bush won in 2004.
The Obama campaign yesterday launched a blizzard of attacks on television and the internet, recalling Mr McCain’s links to Charles Keating, a banker jailed for fraud in the early 1990s.
Speaking in New Mexico yesterday, Mr McCain criticised Mr Obama in his harshest terms to date, claiming that the Democrat has been evasive about his past and that he counters every criticism by accusing opponents of lying. “I don’t need lessons about telling the truth to American people. And were I ever to need any improvement in that regard, I probably wouldn’t seek advice from a Chicago politician. My opponent’s touchiness every time he is questioned about his record should make us only more concerned,” Mr McCain said.
“All people want to know is: What has this man ever actually accomplished in government? What does he plan for America? In short: Who is the real Barack Obama? But ask such questions and all you get in response is another barrage of angry insults.”
Meanwhile, Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin stepped up her criticism of Mr Obama for associating with Bill Ayers, a former urban guerrilla who is now a university professor in Chicago. “I’m afraid this is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to work with a former domestic terrorist who had targeted his own country,” Ms Palin told supporters in Florida.
Mr Obama yesterday accused the McCain campaign of exaggerating his relationship with Mr Ayers in an effort to distract attention from the economy. “Mr Ayers is somebody who lives in Chicago,” Mr Obama said. “He’s a professor at the University of Illinois, teaches education, and he engaged in these despicable acts 40 years ago when I was eight years old. I served on a board with him. And so now they’re trying to use this as guilt by association, and as you said, they’ve explicitly stated that what they want to do is to change the topic because they don’t want to talk about the economy and the failed policies of the last eight years, so, you know, I think the American people deserve better.”
Later, Mr Obama’s chief strategist, David Axelrod, said the Democrat did not know about Mr Ayres’ radical past when he attended a political event at the professor’s home in 1995. The McCain campaign pounced on the claim, accusing Mr Obama of dishonesty.
“Does Barack Obama truly expect the American people to believe that he had no idea about his friend’s past as the infamous founder of the domestic terror group, The Weather Underground, or is he just lying?” the Republican campaign said.
“If Obama didn’t know in 1995 about the bombings Ayers was responsible for, when did he find out – because Obama was promoting Ayers’ book in 1997, serving on boards with him until 2002, and trading e-mails and phone calls with him as recently as 2005. If Obama really was unaware of Ayers’ radical past, learning the truth doesn’t seem to have had any effect on their friendship.”
The Obama campaign yesterday released a link to a website recounting Mr McCain’s relationship with Mr Keating, whose savings and loans bank failed in the early 1990s, causing tens of thousands of people to lose their life savings. Mr McCain was one of five senators – known as the Keating Five – who were investigated for lobbying federal regulators on the banker’s behalf.
An ethics committee found that Mr McCain had not acted unethically but that he had shown poor judgment in his dealings with Mr Keating. In an e-mail, Obama campaign manager David Plouffe said the current financial crisis made the Keating story relevant because it highlighted Mr McCain’s history of supporting the deregulation of the financial services industry.
“During the savings and loan crisis of the late ’80s and early ’90s, McCain’s political favours and aggressive support for deregulation put him at the centre of the fall of Lincoln Savings and Loan, one of the largest in the country,” Mr Plouffe wrote. “The McCain campaign has tried to avoid talking about the scandal, but with so many parallels to the current crisis, McCain’s Keating history is relevant and voters deserve to know the facts – and see for themselves the pattern of poor judgment by John McCain.”