‘Attack by Association’ (From The Wall Street Journal -- The Washington Wire

September 19, 2008, 7:00 pm
‘Attack by Association’ Viewed as Fair Game by McCain Camp
Laura Meckler reports on the presidential race:

Don’t be shocked if you see the McCain campaign pull the controversial Rev. Jeremiah Wright out of mothballs in new attacks against one-time parishioner, Barack Obama.

McCain advisers say that they see “attack by association” as fair game now, arguing that Obama’s campaign has been using that technique to go after McCain. In particular, the Obama campaign has hammered McCain on the stump and in TV ads on the number of one-time lobbyists working for his campaign. (The McCain campaign is also angry about a Spanish-language TV ad that ties McCain to Rush Limbaugh on immigration, without ever saying that McCain took on Limbaugh and others to fight for comprehensive immigration reform.)

“They played it one way, we played it another way,” said one of McCain’s top advisers, Mark Salter. “Now we’re both going to play it the same way.”

McCain began that effort this week by linking Obama to Democrats Jim Johnson and Franklin Raines, former executives at Fannie Mae. Johnson was named to head Obama’s vice presidential search before he stepped down amid controversy. Raines is a supporter of Obama (though evidently not an “adviser” as McCain charged at first).

McCain invoked their names while discussing the origins of the nation’s financial crisis.

“While Fannie Mae was betraying the public trust, somehow its former CEO had managed to gain my opponent’s trust to the point that Sen. Obama actually put him in charge of his vice presidential search,” McCain said at a rally in Blaine, Minn., this afternoon. He added that Johnson walked off with millions of dollars in compensation despite major problems at the institution.

“Let’s tell him to give it back!” McCain bellowed to the crowd, which replied with a chant: “Give it back! Give it back!” It was not exactly clear who Johnson is supposed to give the money back to.

Salter said to expect more of the same, saying the campaign was tired of “catching the spears.” Asked whether to expect attacks involved Wright, campaign spokesman Michael Goldfarb said: “We’ve seen all throughout the (Democratic) primary this guy has a lot of associations that are very problematic.”

In April, McCain said that he did not believe that Obama shared Wright’s controversial views and said he opposed an anti-Obama advertisement that invoked his name run by the North Carolina Republican party. But he also suggested that the subject was fair play after Obama said that questions about Wright were “a legitimate political issue.”

“If he believes that,” McCain said in April, “then it will probably be a political issue.”

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