Candidates Dig Up the Dirt Before Tv Debate

The US presidential debate slipped deeper into the mud yesterday as the Democrats joined the Republicans in dredging up damaging events from each candidate's past ahead of tonight's prime-time television debate between Barack Obama and John McCain.

Obama's campaign team, intent on demonstrating it is not going to be a soft touch, resurrected a 1989 financial scandal involving McCain. In a concerted advertising and internet blitz, Obama used the scandal in which McCain was reprimanded to link the Republican candidate for the White House to lobbyists and big business.

The blitz was in retaliation for McCain linking the Democrat nominee at the weekend with Bill Ayers, a former member of a US urban guerrilla group.

McCain's vice-presidential running-mate Sarah Palin, at a rally in Florida yesterday, again brought up the link between Obama and Ayers, and forecast that the campaign between now and election day was "gonna get kind of rough".

The exchanges have created a poisonous atmosphere ahead of the debate in Nashville, Tennessee, one of the last chances for the Republicans to turn around a White House election that appears to be slipping away from them.

The town-hall style debate is more important for McCain than Obama. A draw would be good enough for the Democratic candidate, but McCain needs to secure a clear-cut victory that might reverse the huge opinion poll losses of the past fortnight. If Obama maintains the poll lead through to the election on November 4, the Democrats would enjoy one of their biggest landslides in history.

Tad Devine, the Democratic strategist who was a key adviser to both Al Gore in 2000 and John Kerry in 2004, said: "He is going to have to go after Obama. If he doesn't go after Obama in the town hall meeting, his election is over. It's like sands through the hour glass."

Although McCain apparently told his campaign team that Obama's ties with his former pastor, the controversial Jeremiah Wright, were off-limits, the conservative columnist William Kristol wrote in the New York Times yesterday that Palin said: "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."

Howard Wolfson, Hillary Clinton's former communications manager, wrote in a blog for New Republic that McCain's negative campaign would not save the Republican candidate. "John McCain's candidacy is as much a casualty of Wall Street as Lehman or Merrill," he said.

Although there is a sense of despondency in the McCain camp, they are clinging to the fact that Obama's lead in the opinion polls is not, given the economic background, double the 7% lead that Gallup recorded yesterday. The poll put Obama on 50% to McCain's 43%.

McCain, who was relatively passive in the first televised debate with Obama, spent the weekend at his home in Sedona, Arizona, practicing for tonight's event which will be in his preferred format, with questions coming from the audience. Obama spent yesterday holed up in Ashville, North Carolina, rehearsing his lines, with a Washington lawyer, Greg Craig, playing the part of McCain.

Obama broke off preparations yesterday for a television interview in which he spoke about his new ad describing McCain as one of the senators who lobbied in 1989 on behalf of Charles Keating, whose savings and loans institution collapsed.

Obama claimed this showed McCain relied on lobbyists from the big oil companies and other corporations. "I think it's going to be a lot more relevant to the American people than somebody who is tangentially related to me," Obama said, referring to Ayers.

McCain's team said yesterday he would seek to raise concerns about the impact on voters of Obama's tax increases, and also Obama's criticism of US air raids on Afghan civilians.

The McCain team faces potentially bad publicity after seven Alaska state employees who earlier failed to give evidence to a legislative inquiry agreed to testify on Palin's involvement in the Troopergate affair, the alleged abuse of her position as the state's governor to sack her former brother-in-law, who was involved in a child custody battle.