Charles Kaiser on the start of McCain's dirty campaign, and this week's winners and sinners

So much for Cindy McCain's "clean campaign."

Yesterday George Bush made a despicable speech to the Israeli Knesset accusing Democrats of appeasement, and John McCain immediately inserted the words "Barack Obama" into the coy blank space the president had left in the middle of his address.

McCain's words put him at the heart of the Republican tradition of slandering Democrats to stoke irrational fears within the American electorate. This enduring specialty can be traced from Karl Rove through Lee Atwater to Spiro Agnew (whose lines were written by Pat Buchanan and Bill Safire), all the way back to Richard Nixon, whose McCarthyite smears of Democratic legislators in the midterm elections of 1954 inspired Herblock's iconic cartoon of Eisenhower's vice president emerging from a sewer to give a campaign speech.

Misusing the Munich parallel is a great American tradition for presidents committed to quagmires of their own making. Neville Chamberlain's disastrous decision to appease Adolf Hitler in Munich by giving him Czechoslovakia's Sudetenland in 1938 made World War II inevitable in 1939. Since then, Munich has been cited as an excuse for everything from Vietnam (remember the "domino theory"?) to the invasion of Iraq. But it's particularly revolting to hear it used by George Bush, a man whose administration's contempt for history is only equaled by its ignorance of it.

Hyperbole? Not at all. Consider the immortal words of former Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz in front of the House Budget Committee before the Iraq invasion, when he derided General Eric K. Shinseki's estimate that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to pacify postwar Iraq as ''wildly off the mark.''

Why was Wolfowitz so confident that 100,000 troops would be enough? Because, he explained, there was "no history of ethnic strife in Iraq." And now we have a presumptive Republican presidential nominee who can't even remember the difference between Sunnis and Shias.

There is no mystery about why McCain has dropped so quickly into the guttersnipe style of Republican politics. With $4-a-gallon gas, a 100-year war in Iraq, and the most unpopular president of modern times, the Republicans are once again left with the two issues they have relied upon explicitly or implicitly for four decades: fear of foreigners (now "terrorists") and fear of blacks.

The Washington Post surely brought joy to the hearts of Republican apparatchiks everywhere with its piece last Tuesday, in which reporter Kevin Merida described "raw racism and hostility that have gone largely unnoticed—and unreported—this election season." The piece once again raised the fundamental question of this election: Can a black man be elected president of the United States? But by running together all the worst examples the reporter could find, I suspect it overstated the problem.

Much more interesting and much more nuanced was John B. Judis' piece on "Obama and the psychology of the color barrier" in the New Republic. "Although voters will respond unconsciously to an implicit appeal that they don't perceive as racist, they will recoil for reasons of conscience or social disapproval to an appeal that either is, or is seen as, racist," the article asserted. Judis also pointed out that the white women who are bedrock Hillary supporters are also among the least racist voters; therefore, "Obama should be able to inherit them."

But by far the most encouraging news of the week came from Mississippi, where voters in a special election were barraged with ads linking Democratic candidate Travis Childers to Obama—and Travis trounced his Republican opponent anyway. The Republican share of the vote plummeted in just two years from 66 percent in 2006 to 46 percent last Tuesday. Democrats have won all three special House elections this year, with the Republican vote dropping by a startling 23 percent.

These numbers suggest that there is no such thing as a safe Republican house seat in 2008. But Democratic National Committee Treasurer Andrew Tobias tells Full Court Press that it's too early to be jubilant: "I'm cautiously optimistic about a terrific November, but everybody's got to pitch in," Tobias says. "It's not going to happen by itself."

Winner: Former New York Times executive editor Max Frankel, for his pithy remarks in a five-minute interview with a Columbia journalism student. Frankel said, "Judy Miller should never have been allowed to kind of freelance the way she was." Then he was asked if he would have run the story about John McCain, which implied that a woman lobbyist friend of the Senator's was also his mistress.

"No," said Frankel. "Not in that form. Enough said."

Sinner: Leon Wieseltier, for the latest in an endless series of outrageous Washington diaries in the New Republic. This one idiotically asserts that the bizarre rantings of Jeremiah Wright are "reminiscent of Barack Obama's legendary Philadelphia speech."

They aren't.

Winner: Michael Crowley, in the same issue of the New Republic, for a superb piece explaining how Hillary Clinton's never-say-die attitude in this campaign was molded by her experiences during Bill's impeachment: "The Clintons find themselves victimized and under siege. The presidency is being stolen from them. The press is out to get them. They deride elites and champion the masses. They live in a constant state of emergency. But they will endure any humiliation, ride out any crisis, fight on even when fighting seems hopeless."

Winner: Executive producer Jeff Fager and the producers and correspondents of 60 Minutes, for a superb season of hard-hitting pieces on everything from torture to the war in Iraq, which landed the 40-year-old show in the top 10 sixteen times this season. Latest prize: the Robert F. Kennedy Journalism award for "Evidence of Injustice," reported by Steve Kroft and produced by Ira Rosen, with a print version written by reporter John Solomon appearing in the Washington Post on the same day. The joint investigation revealed that the "science" of bullet lead analysis, used to convict hundreds of defendants, was deeply flawed. It was the ninth major award for the show this year, including four Emmys, an Alfred I. DuPont-Columbia University Silver Baton, a Peabody, and an RTNDA Edward R. Murrow award.

Sinner: Emily's List founder Ellen Malcolm for encouraging that never-say-die attitude on the Washington Post's op-ed page. "Why on earth should one candidate quit before the contest is finished?" Answer: because her race no longer serves any useful purpose.

Winners: Jo Becker and Christopher Drew, for the first genuinely sophisticated and even-handed account in the New York Times of Obama's early years in Illinois politics.

Winner: Jacob Leibenluft for an interesting takeout in Slate about the future of Clinton's campaign debt—and how Hillary will have to keep raising money once the primaries are over, as the campaigns of Chris Dodd, Bill Richardson, and Rudy Giuliani are doing now. The article also mentions famous debtor John Glenn. The former senator still owed $3 million 20 years after his failed 1984 bid for the presidency.

Winner: Michelle Boornstein, for her meditation on the evolving attitudes of younger American Jews toward Israel. Their education about the homeland is also changing: "Experts in Jewish education describe replacing mushy classic ballads like 'Jerusalem of Gold' from the 1960s with tracks from Israeli rappers who sing about immigration and sexuality, or jettisoning lessons about pioneering kibbutzim and replacing them with ones about Israel's technology wunderkinds."

Winner: The Times of London, for reporting a vital new bicycle-friendly innovation: Cars may soon be equipped with airbags intended to save lives outside the vehicle—the airbags inflate beneath a car's hood and at the base of the windshield. Good news for cyclists, who are 20 times more likely to be killed than car occupants per kilometer traveled.

Winner: Adam Reilly in the Boston Phoenix, for 10 story ideas for campaign reporters on the "straight-talk express" who are still besotted with John McCain. Example: "Hints of misogyny—In 1998, at a Republican fundraiser, McCain reportedly told this awful joke: "Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno." This past November, McCain chuckled when a South Carolina woman asked of Hillary Clinton: "How do we beat the bitch?" (After answering the question, he professed his respect for Clinton.) And according to The Real McCain: Why Conservatives Don't Trust Him and Why Independents Shouldn't (PoliPoint), a new book by Cliff Schecter, McCain subjected his wife, Cindy, to a vulgar tirade, including a C-bomb, when she joked about his thinning hair in 1992. (Schecter cites three unnamed Arizona journalists; McCain has denied this account.) In addition, he recently opposed legislation that would guarantee women equal pay for equal work. What does McCain's biography tell us about his interactions with and views on women?

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Reporter: Richard Vanderford

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Charles Kaiser is the author of The Gay Metropolis and 1968 in America. He has been media editor for Newsweek, a member of the metro staff of the New York Times, and a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, where he covered the press and book publishing. To learn more, visit charleskaiser.com.