Yesterday was the day the presidential campaign turned ugly.

Let's remember the date. I think it started when McCain mumbled a nonanswer to the question how many houses did he own. The Obama campaign chomped at what looked like yummy bait and spewed a clunky class warfare ad, and then the McCain campaign took that as license to churn out a local-election-style negative ad about Obama and Rezko.

Then there was this ad too — not an official campaign ad — but nevertheless a warning of how bad things are going to get:



Andrew Sullivan says:

The far right goes there. The source of the smear is a group called the American Issues Project. According to Ben Smith, its spokesman, Christian Pinkston, is a former aide to presidential candidate Jack Kemp, and went on to run the conservative group Empower America. Jack Kemp must be proud, don't you think? And Stanley Kurtz just had an obasm.

I wonder if Sullivan knows that Rush Limbaugh uses the word "obasm." Limbaugh uses it, however, not to describe the response of Obama haters, but Obama lovers. Interestingly different uses of the sexual metaphor, no?

And let's think about what it means to have gone there. What's the there to which we should be so concerned about not going? At the Ben Smith link (above), we see this:

The use of 9/11 imagery links Ayers, and Obama, to the American conflict Islamic terror, which is the subject of many viral e-mails attacking Obama.

The group's spokesman, Christian Pinkston, called the suggestion that the group is making any link with Islam "unfair."

"The idea here was to talk about the fact that his friends hate America, and that's who he's aligning himself with," he said.

I heard and saw the ad a few times without hearing any insinuation that Obama is Muslim, but perhaps that's because I know who Ayers is and what the Weathermen were. If the there to which one is not to go is simply terrorism, I agree that it's ridiculous to suggest that Obama is a terrorist, but it is certainly legitimate to investigate his connection to Ayers — as Stanley Kurtz is trying to do:

William Ayers—and his ties to Barack Obama—have re-emerged as an issue this week after Stanley Kurtz recounted Aug. 18 in the conservative National Review how he was unable to access 132 boxes of records of internal files for the Chicago Annenberg Challenge stored at the Richard J. Daley Library at the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers is a professor.

Ayers was a founder of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, which focuses on school reform, and Obama was chairman of the board at the time he was getting his start in Chicago politics.

A 1960s radical in the Weather Underground, Ayers spent several years as a fugitive. Today, he’s a college professor and prominent political activist in Chicago.

Obama has described Ayers as “a guy who lives in my neighborhood,” and has said it’s absurd to link him to the terrorist acts Ayers participated in during the 1960s, including planting bombs in the Pentagon. “And the notion that somehow as a consequence of me knowing somebody who engaged in detestable acts 40 years ago when I was eight years old, somehow reflects on me and my values, doesn’t make much sense,” Obama has said....

The Chicago Tribune pressed [Mayor Richard M.] Daley Wednesday on whether the documents should be released. “People keep trying to align himself with Barack Obama,” Daley said of Ayers. “It’s really unfortunate. They’re friends. So what? People do make mistakes in the past. You move on. This is a new century, a new time. He reflects back and he’s been making a strong contribution to our community.”

Well, if everything's just lovely, release the documents.