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."