Joe Klein's article today in Time Magazine rightly identifies John McCain's pitiful decision to take the lowest low-road in the 2008 presidential campaign.
...there is no excuse for what the McCain campaign is doing on the "putting America first" front. There is no way to balance it, or explain it other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used. There is a straight up argument to be had in this election: Mcain has a vastly different view from Obama about foreign policy, taxation, health care, government action...you name it. He has lots of experience; it is always shocking to remember that this time four years ago, Barack Obama was still in the Illinois State Legislature. Apparently, though, McCain isn't confident that conservative policies and personal experience can win, given the ruinous state of the nation after eight years of Bush. So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama's patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. Those tactics won George Bush a primary--and a nomination. But they proved a form of slow-acting spiritual poison, rotting the core of the Bush presidency. We'll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency--what sort of country--that will produce.
Clearly McCain has decided to pull out all the stops and throw the kitchen sink at Obama, and by doing so he has abandoned every honorable intention he might have earlier espoused. He has embraced the Rovian tactics that sidelined his own campaign back in 2000. He has officially endorsed the lying smear that circulated about him fathering a "black love child".
John McCain may have once been an honorable man, but he is clearly running a dishonorable campaign. Dostoevsky famously said that if God is dead all things can be justified. I suppose John McCain's campaign proves the same thing about honor.