I think Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin are on to some­thing about the sub­text of all this Ayers stuff bil­low­ing up out of the McCain cam­paign these days. Martin writes:

At best, this is to say that Obama doesn’t believe in Amer­i­can excep­tion­al­ism. At worst, and this is where the new ad goes, it means Obama doesn’t suf­fi­ciently love Amer­ica and is actu­ally apart from it.

And Smith concurs:

It’s not about an obscure ’60s rad­i­cal; it’s about chal­leng­ing Obama’s Amer­i­can­ness, which is why the lan­guage of the ads, delib­er­ately or inad­ver­tently, echoes the lan­guage of viral emails that do that more directly.

But in another sense, I think Martin and Smith stop a step too short in their analy­sis.

Where are we now?

+ Reports off the Hill say that a deal is done. $700B total, greater Con­gres­sional over­sight, restric­tions on exec­u­tive pay, no bank­ruptcy law changes, no money for afford­able hous­ing, the (use­less) House GOP insur­ance pro­posal stays in but only as an option, and, most impor­tantly, the gov­ern­ment gets equity war­rants in case the toxic assets really are as bad as every­one fears. Obama and McCain are both on board.

+ Paul Krug­man and Brad DeLong are now openly favor­ing Swedish-​style nation­al­iza­tion instead of the Paul­son plan–which, for the record, Yves Smith has been push­ing since the begin­ning–even though Krug­man, at least, rec­og­nizes that a nation­al­iza­tion plan is polit­i­cal poison until at least after the election.

McCain sur­ro­gate Sen. Lind­say Graham has learned from the master about the joys of errati­cism. From Politico this morning:

Stick with me, folks. From CNN:

McCain camp to pro­pose post­pon­ing VP debate

McCain sup­porter Sen. Lind­sey Graham tells CNN the McCain cam­paign is propos­ing to the Pres­i­den­tial Debate Com­mis­sion and the Obama camp that if there’s no bailout deal by Friday, the first pres­i­den­tial debate should take the place of the VP debate, cur­rently sched­uled for next Thurs­day, Octo­ber 2 in St. Louis.

In this sce­nario, the vice pres­i­den­tial debate between Joe Biden and Sarah Palin would be resched­uled for a date yet to be deter­mined, and take place in Oxford, Mis­sis­sippi, cur­rently slated to be the site of the first pres­i­den­tial face­off this Friday.