From the October 20 issue of The New Yorker comes Hendrik Hertzberg's Beyond The Palin, a compelling critique of Republican negativism. Mentioned is their attempt to smear Obama as a terrorist, raising questions about his association with Bill Ayers, a college professor and pillar of the Chicago education-reform establishment who was once a Weatherman but has since renounced his New Left affiliations of the late 60s (a time, by the way, when Obama was 8 years old and living with his mother in Indonesia).

The Obama campaign has been spending money on negativity ... But there is no equivalence between the two campaigns. If there were, Obama’s ads would be “raising questions” about the other ticket’s “associations.” For example, Todd Palin was a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party — to which his wife, as governor, has sent friendly greetings — between 1995 and 2002. Four years before Todd joined, the A.I.P.’s founder, Joe Vogler, declared, “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” and added, referring to the Stars and Stripes, “I won’t be buried under their damned flag!” (Sure enough, in 1995, Vogler, after being murdered in connection with an informal transaction involving plastic explosives, was buried in Canada.) Good material for an attack ad there, no? Ditto the fact that during the early nineteen-eighties John McCain sat on the advisory board of General John Singlaub’s U.S. Council for World Freedom—the American outpost of the World Anti-Communist League, a sort of clearing house for former Nazi collaborators, Central American death-squad leaders, and assorted international thugs ...
The Obama campaign hasn’t gone there, for which it deserves no special credit; it has more to gain from sticking to the realities of the economy and the war. But the other side has been late in having second thoughts. This became frighteningly obvious in recent days, as the rallies McCain and Palin have held around the country turned into bloodcurdling hate-fests. The shouts of supporters in response to the candidates’ attacks on Obama — “Traitor!” “Terrorist!” “Kill him!” — were uttered without rebuke. On CNN the other night, Anderson Cooper asked David Gergen, the soul of moderate concerned citizenship, about “all this anger out there.” Gergen replied, “We’ve seen it in a Palin rally. We saw it at the McCain rally today. . . . There is this free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we’re not far from that.” ...
If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own. One can only hope that the tragedy will be his alone, and not the nation’s.