Obama and Bill Clinton Share a Laugh

There was a moment last night when Barack Obama was saying the McCain campaign was calling him a Socialist because he had once shared a peanut butter sandwich with a classmate and Bill Clinton laughed--not that slit-eyed, calculated political chuckle but a genuine guffaw of recognition from someone who had suffered the smear treatment and survived.

When the former President was being hounded by Newt Gingrich and his merry midgets, it was no laughing matter, and there is still reason to believe that Clinton failed to take out Osama bin Laden when he could have back then because it would have been seen as a "Wag the Dog" diversion from his impeachment.

But more than a decade later, the politics of personal destruction has worn thin, and what was tragic back then can be seen as comedy now in the tired attacks that McCain-Palin are mouthing about terrorists, wealth-spreaders and the like.

In his campaign, Barack Obama may not exactly be standing on Bill Clinton's shoulders, as he graciously suggested last night (“In case all of you forgot, this is what it’s like to have such a great president”), but in the finesse with which he is swatting away Rovian accusations in these final days, the candidate of tomorrow is definitely profiting from the bitter experience of yesterday's target.

It was nice to see them sharing a laugh about it last night.

McCain-Palin Cartoon Campaign

Never overburdened with ideas to start, the Republican race has degenerated into a series of loony-tune stereotypes of Barack Obama--as a swarthy Muslim terrorist, a latte-drinking elitist and now, worst of all, a socialist.

"Barack Obama calls it spreading the wealth," Sarah Palin is warning New Mexico voters. "Joe Biden calls higher taxes patriotic. But Joe the plumber and Ed the dairy man, I believe that they think that it sounds more like socialism. Friends, now is no time to experiment with socialism."

It may come as a surprise to Palin that her running mate just voted to nationalize banks, but words have lost all meaning in the final stages of this weird campaign, which calls up the old jokes about accusing an opponent of being "a shameless extrovert" who was known to have engaged in "nepotism" with his sister-in-law, "who was once a thespian" and "even performed the act in front of paying customers" in wicked New York City.

The McCain-Palin people must be mining old issues of Mad Magazine for their linguistic sleight-of-hand, but they are obviously counting on unnerving voters who may have limited vocabularies.

One of their surrogates, Florida Sen. Mel Martinez is equating Obama's tax plan to the policies of Communist Cuba:

"Where I come from, where I was raised, they tried wealth redistribution. We don't need that here. That's called socialism, communism--not Americanism."

Most Americans with a grade-school education would call that demagoguery.