NASHVILLE, Tenn. — When the Tennessee Republican Party issued a news release in February titled “Anti-Semites for Obama” — with references to “Barack Hussein Obama” and a picture of the senator in a traditional Somali outfit that it described as “Muslim” — likely Republican nominee John McCain took one of his first stands as party figurehead to condemn it.
“If I am the nominee of the party, I will obviously assure that everyone within my party knows that this has got to be a respectful debate,” McCain said then.
Two months later, McCain delivered a similar rebuke to the North Carolina Republican Party for an ad about Obama’s relationship to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, saying that “there’s no place for that kind of campaigning.”
At the time, Obama offered a reciprocal gesture, declaring that McCain’s role in the “Keating Five” congressional influence-peddling scandal two decades ago was “not germane to the presidency.”
As their parties’ nominees, neither McCain nor Obama has campaigned in Tennessee. But as they prepared to meet Tuesday night in Nashville — after days of exchanges about Obama’s relationship with ’60s radical William Ayers and McCain’s with convicted felon Charles Keating — those springtime vows continue to define the bounds of propriety in a race that has turned increasingly negative.
“The limits are that the American people don’t want to hear very much of it,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander of Tennessee. “The real limits are that in a debate, they are feet from each other and real people are in front of them. It’s easier to attack your opponent when he’s not standing 3 feet from you.”
At a fundraising lunch where much of Nashville’s Democratic establishment gathered Tuesday for chicken cutlets and cinnamon tarts, February was recalled as a moment in a presidential contest that “The Economist” once called “America at its best.”
“McCain got desperate. Desperate people do desperate things,” said George Barrett, a Nashville lawyer and one-time aide to Sen. Albert Gore Sr. “McCain claimed he was going to take the high road, but he fell in the gutter.”
McCain has not invoked Obama’s middle name or talked about his religion, and aides this week said that Wright — and his record of statements widely perceived as unpatriotic — remained off-limits even as McCain’s running mate told a columnist that she thought they should not be.
“I don’t know why that association isn’t discussed more, because those were appalling things that that pastor had said about our great country,” Sarah Palin said.
Each side has nurtured its own narrative of the campaign’s increased obsession with character as inscribed by one’s circle of acquaintances.
Obama aides say that McCain led the descent into cynicism with his summertime mockery of Obama as a vapid celebrity and subsequent distortion of his positions on issues such as sex education. They are reminding voters of McCain’s involvement in the Keating banking scandal this week only because McCain and Palin put the focus on Obama’s connections to Ayers, they said.
“Their guilt-by-association approach is different,” said Obama spokeswoman Jen Psaki, arguing that Keating became germane because banking scandals have dominated recent news.
For McCain aides, the story begins in February. McCain’s condemnations of state-party attacks on Obama, along with his proposals for the candidates to jointly accept public financing and campaign together at town-hall meetings, were evidence that they sought a high-minded campaign.
They say it changed as Obama rejected those entreaties and tried to stigmatize McCain advisers for their work as lobbyists.
