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.

Ben Smith links to an inter­view that Sarah Palin gave to Hugh Hewitt this after­noon. In it, after attack­ing Barack Obama for his views on abor­tion, she refers to

my posi­tion of just want­ing that cul­ture of life to be respected, and not want­ing gov­ern­ment to sanc­tion the idea of ending life.

Are we allowed to ask, then (or would it con­sti­tute more “gotcha journalism”?) if this means that Palin opposes the death penalty as well? From what I’ve seen around the inter­net, she would seem not to, but if you don’t want “government to sanc­tion the idea of ending life” doesn’t that mean you don’t want gov­ern­ment to sanc­tion the idea of ending life?

And yes, I know that the Repub­li­can Party has tried to hijack the phrase “culture of life” from the orig­i­nal sense in which Pope John Paul II deployed it. The pope did use it to oppose abor­tion but also to oppose the death penalty (and euthana­sia, and stem cell research). When the Repub­li­cans imported it into their 2004 plat­form, how­ever, they explic­itly endorsed the government’s right to impose the death penalty.

None of that really mat­ters, though, since in the second part of that sen­tence Palin is unchar­ac­ter­is­ti­cally clear about the role gov­ern­ment should (not) have in ending life. Do I believe that Palin really opposes the death penalty? Of course not, though it would be one of the few good things I could say about her if she did.

The Wash­ing­ton Post has a nice story up about Danielle Allen’s efforts to trace the ori­gins of the Obama-is-a-Muslim smear.

I should start by saying that Allen is some­thing of a hero to many us who know her even slightly, and not just because she earned two doc­tor­ates by the time she was 29. I don’t know her at all well, but as Dean of the Human­i­ties Divi­sion at the U. of C. she was the uni­ver­sity offi­cer most directly respon­si­ble for Chicago Review.

Ben Smith at Politico takes a swipe at Allen–or at least the Post’s val­i­da­tion of her research–for coming too late to a story that’s already been cov­ered by him and others:

There’s some inter­est­ing stuff in the story about how a smear spreads, but I’m not sure where the two doc­tor­ates come in. Indeed, Allen could have made it to her key discovery—that the author of the smear was a mar­ginal Illi­nois char­ac­ter named Andy Martin—without even resort­ing to The Google. Chris Hayes (who, with Jonathan Martin and me, has been obsess­ing about this since last fall) tracked it back to Martin in his Nation piece last October.

This kind of turf-​guarding is fairly pre­dictable, espe­cially when it’s jour­nal­ists and aca­d­e­mics who are stand­ing on oppo­site sides of the picket fence. (Smith, joking about Hayes: “Give that man a Ph.D. Or two.”)

But Smith’s self-​confessed super­cil­ious­ness seems mis­placed.

…is, they’ve been telling us since March 4, how the race for the Demo­c­ra­tic nom­i­na­tion was going to end. And sure enough, the whim­per­ing has begun in earnest. How do we know? Ben Smith at Politico is going on vacation.

If that doesn’t con­vince you, con­sider how quickly Adam Nagourney’s arti­cle in yesterday’s New York Times has become the cor­ner­stone of the new con­ven­tional wisdom about the race.