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. [Read more]

[UPDATE 9/17: Turns out Biden and Obama are just as con­fused on the AIG bailout as McCain is. I've added in their con­flict­ing state­ments below.]

1/ John McCain, speak­ing yes­ter­day to NBC’s Matt Lauer, as reported by ABC’s Ron Claiborne:

“No, I do not believe that the Amer­i­can tax­payer should be on the hook for AIG and I’m glad that the Sec­re­tary Paul­son has appar­ently taken the same line.”

NBC’s Matt Lauer pressed McCain: “So, if we get to the point, in the middle of the week when AIG might have to file for bank­ruptcy, they’re on their own?”

McCain replied, “Well, they’re on their own. We cannot have the tax­pay­ers bail out AIG or any­body else, this is some­thing that we’re going to have to work through.”

1a/ And Joe Biden, speak­ing yes­ter­day to NBC’s Mered­ith Viera:

No, I don’t think [AIG] should be bailed out by the fed­eral gov­ern­ment. I’ll tell you what we should do. We should try to cor­rect the prob­lems that caused this.

2/ John McCain, speak­ing today to ABC’s Robin Roberts:

I didn’t want to do that. And I don’t think any­body I know wanted to do that. But there are lit­er­ally mil­lions of people whose retire­ment, whose invest­ment, whose insur­ance were at risk here.

2a/ And Barack Obama, in a state­ment today:

The fact that we have reached a point where the Fed­eral Reserve felt it had to take this unprece­dented step with the Amer­i­can Insur­ance Group is the final ver­dict on the failed eco­nomic phi­los­o­phy of the last eight years…. While we do not know all the details of this arrange­ment, the Fed must ensure that the plan pro­tects the fam­i­lies that count on insur­ance. It should bol­ster our economy’s abil­ity to create good-​paying jobs and help work­ing Amer­i­cans pay their bills and save their money. It must not bail out the share­hold­ers or man­age­ment of AIG.

Politico’s Jonathan Martin quotes the fol­low­ing state­ment from the McCain cam­paign this morn­ing that attempts to square the two positions:

The focus of any such action should be to pro­tect the mil­lions of Amer­i­cans who hold insur­ance poli­cies, retire­ment plans and other accounts with AIG. We must not bailout the man­age­ment and spec­u­la­tors who cre­ated this mess. They had months of warn­ings fol­low­ing the Bear Stearns deba­cle, and they failed to act.

Don’t be deceived by this. As any­body who’s been paying atten­tion to the sit­u­a­tion will know, insur­ance poli­cies and retire­ment plans have noth­ing to do with the bailout. AIG’s insur­ance and retire­ment plans are run through AIG sub­sidiaries, which every­one agrees are well cap­i­tal­ized and which, at least in the case of the insur­ance oper­a­tions, are gov­erned by strict reg­u­la­tions that severely limit the risk to people like you and me. Noth­ing I’ve read in the last couple of days sug­gests that these were ever in danger, even if AIG went into bankruptcy.

Rather, the reason for the Fed bailout is, quite simply, the mas­sive coun­ter­party risk that an AIG fail­ure would cause. [Read more]

From Politico’s Jonathan Martin:

Asked what work John McCain did as chair­man of the Senate Com­merce Com­mit­tee that helped him under­stand the finan­cial mar­kets, the candidate’s top eco­nomic adviser wielded visual evi­dence: his BlackBerry.

“He did this,” Dou­glas Holtz-​Eakin told reporters this morn­ing, hold­ing up his Black­Berry. “Telecommunications of the United States is a pre­mier inno­va­tion in the past 15 years, comes right through the Com­merce Com­mit­tee. So you’re look­ing at the mir­a­cle John McCain helped create and that’s what he did.”

The McCain cam­paign, fear­ing an Al Gore moment, quickly tried to explain Holtz-Eakin’s com­ment away as a joke, but ABC News’s Ron Clai­borne told Jake Tapper that it was noth­ing of the kind:

McCain may be making light of it, but it was not joke as told by Holtz-​Eakin. Just the oppo­site, he was seri­ous, emphatic and even a little defen­sive when he said it.

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. [Read more]