The only question is: Is he lying now? Or has he been lying for the last 18 months?

Good God, the association with Ayers by itself is trivial as far as the general public goes – they don’t know who he is, and communism isn’t the boogaboo it was thirty years ago.

But McCain should forthrightly assert that Obama was brought onto the CAC board by one Bill Ayers, who had figured out how to game the Annenberg Foundation for enormous funds. Annenberg wanted the money to improve Chicago education. Obama doled it out instead to organizations of radicals who ‘organized’ communities into ACORN-like groups for political gain, at the children’s expense – piously bleating about ‘the children’ as a smokescreen. Obama should be taken to account for the self-admitted failure by the CAC to improve the learning of those kids, and should be made to answer why $150,000,000 was diverted from learning to political activists instead. In the business world, that’s fraud, and Obama still needs to answer for it.

That’s IT! At this point, who would?

Circumstances might shift the dynamic of the election, and McCain has come back before, but the signs are not good here.

I would rather my desire that McCain win be replaced with some confidence he has a fighting chance other than telling me how some people, apparently the sleepy ones that are too busy to have paid much if any attention up to this point, will give The One a second look…

… and be miraculously shaken to their boots to the point of voting for McCain.

It’s not my wits that are at issue, it is the sleepy one’s wits. And a slow grinding down may not be enough to put people into shock.

He could have also mentioned Barney Frank. The Massachusetts congressman should have been cited around three or four times. Bill Ayers is not the only miscreant that threatens the Obama campaign!

Capitulation [Rich Lowry]

“It should be the word of the day. Here’s the New York Times on capitulation in the financial context, a “term of art to describe what happens when even the bullish holdouts, the unflagging optimists, throw up their hands and join the stampede out of the market.” A lot of conservatives are throwing up theirs hands today, driven into depression by last night’s debate. But let’s keep our wits about us, as Mark Steyn recommends. One more thought on Ayers. It’s an entirely legitimate issue, but not a magic bullet. McCain could have brought Ayers up last night, but Obama would have given his stock reply and it wouldn’t have been the “game-changer” everyone’s looking for. And if McCain had repeatedly returned to Ayers, it would have seemed weird and off-key. I think McCain made a pretty good substantive case against Obama, and he lived to fight another day. Palin will presumably continue to make the hot-button case against Obama (and it will get attention because the media’s so obsessed with her), while McCain hits Obama on the issues and experience. Absent some major outside event or a big Obama mistake, they’re going to have to try to grind down his lead in the next couple of weeks. I tend to believe that voters are going to take a serious second look at Obama sometime between now and election day and grapple with whether they’re really comfortable making him president. So this thing’s not over. Are the odds long? Sure, but they always were.”