The Gloves Are Coming Off...

As the election moves into  October, and we are not less than a month away from the election, both candidates have moved away from the issues and onto the flaws of their opponents.  Could this affect tonight's debate?  Absolutely it could.  Today, Yahoo! News wrote that the mudslinging could lead to an "awkward debate" (http://news.yahoo.com/s/bloomberg/20081007/pl_bloombrg/aeqhidejpots).

So what is it that the candidates are focusing now?  it can all be summarized into the "guilty by association" idea.  Back and forth, the presidential candidates are drawing on shady relations that their opponents have had in their past.

Sarah Palin called Barack Obama out on his association with 1960's radical Bill Ayers, as well as re-opening the association with Jeremiah Wright.  Are these associations as awful for Obama as Gov. Palin would like you to believe?  It's really hard to tell.  We know how dangerous Ayers was, and we know that Jeremiah Wright has surrounded his career with scandal, but how legitimate is the link between them and Obama? Was he really "palling around" with Ayers?  Only time will bring out the truth on the Ayers issue, but for now, it is a hit with Republicans.  As for Jeremiah Wright, that association has already hurt Obama in the past, and a re-emergence of that issue is the last thing that the Illinois Senator needs to deal with in his campaign.

In the Democrat camp, they are hoping to retaliate to the Ayers/Wright accusations by bringing up McCain's association with the Keating 5 and Iran-Contra scandal.  Little has been said about the Iran-Contra scandal, and the Obamanites are just throwing it out "experimentally" to try and counter the negative attacks that the McCain people have been throwing out.  As for the Keating 5, the Democrats are just kicking a dead horse.  McCain has made statement after statement about how wrong he was to be involved in the infamous 1980s banking scandal.  He has, numerous times, apologized for his involvement.

Does that make it all ok?  Not really, but does it make it better?  It does.  Obama has dodged the issue of his association with the Radical Jeremiah Wright, leading to more and more questions about their relationship.  What Obama needs to do is face the music and say "Hey, yea, I've been around some shady people, I've had intimate relationships with them, I know it was wrong, I would never do it again, let's move on".  But until that happens, we can only speculate.