Bill the bomber is a dud

Electoral-vote.com reports that Rasmussen Reports recently asked questions about William Ayers in their polling, and found that Palin & McCain's guilt by [weak] association strategy against Obama is a miserable failure:

Rasmussen Poll on William Ayers

With the McCain campaign talking about 1960s radical William Ayers all the time, Rasmussen ran a poll to see what people think about him. Not surprisingly most people have an unfavorable view of Ayers that cuts across gender, age, ideology, income, race, education, and everything else. Ayers is not going to win the camper-of-the-week award. However, a more interesting question is whether all this talk of Ayers helps or hurts the McCain campaign. Republicans think it helps the campaign by 2 to 1 while Democrats think it hurts McCain's campaign by 8 to 1. Independents thinks it hurts by nearly 2 to 1. In a similar vein, 47% of self-identifying conservatives thinks it helps the campaign vs. 29% think it hurts. Among liberals the numbers are 7% and 79%. Among moderates 20% think it helps and 58% think it hurts. Thus among moderates, talk of Ayers hurts McCain by nearly 3 to 1. There is no correlation with income or education. So why does McCain keep harping on this point? Is it trying to solidify his base and doesn't give a hoot about the independents? The numbers show this is a terrible strategy as it plays to the people who are already going to vote for him but it works badly with the critical independents he desperately needs. Could it be that Steve Schmidt has drunk his own Kool-Aid and really and truly believes that talking about Ayers helps him? Surely he has the same numbers Rasmussen does. Sometimes ideology gets in the way of running an effective campaign.

While the unprecedented smear campaign against Obama primarily by Palin and also to some extent McCain should never have occurred in the first place because it's dishonest, dishonorable, and just plain ridiculous, now there's proof that it's bad politics, too.

While McCain recently repudiated a woman at a rally in Minnesota about Obama, saying to her, "No, ma'am, he's a decent family man, a citizen, who I just happen to have disagreements with on fundamental issues," he and Palin have yet to do so to a national audience. Since it doesn't seem likely that they'll do so before election day, it is important that both he, and to an even greater extent Palin, very clearly reject and repudiate the smears they've made. I assume they'll try to pass the blame it on the supporters for connecting the dots of their statements, similar to the way Bush acted sheepish several years ago when he came out and said, "This administration never said that the 9/11 attacks were orchestrated between Saddam and al Qaeda," despite the numerous insinuations of exactly that that he and others in his administration made in their campaign for war.