As they prepare for Nashville debate, John McCain and Barack Obama fire off attacks
McCain allies portray their opponent as a far left-wing candidate. An Obama ad says McCain is 'out of ideas, out of touch and running out of time.'
WASHINGTON -- Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain are preparing for tonight's presidential debate in the country music capital of Nashville, but no one is expecting them to make music together.
With McCain lagging in polls in key battleground states, his campaign has turned personal, pushing a volley of caricatures of Obama as a far left-wing candidate out of touch with mainstream America.
In an interview this morning on MSNBC, former New York Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani, citing Obama's association with William Ayers, a former 1960s radical, and controversial pastor Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., called the Illinois senator "the most left-wing candidate of the Democratic Party."
And Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin continued her sharp attacks on Obama from the campaign trail, telling voters at a rally in Jacksonville, Fla., this morning that Obama was having convenient memory lapses.
Calling Ayers "a domestic terrorist," Palin said that Obama remembered Ayers "as just a guy in the neighborhood." Noting Obama's earlier call for diplomacy with Iran's Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, she added, "Will he now claim that he was unaware of his background?"
The attacks continued in new ads released by the McCain campaign calling Obama a "hypocrite" for assailing McCain's attacks while dishing out his own.
For its part, the Obama campaign also released new ads saying that McCain has descended to "smears" because the Arizona senator is "out of ideas, out of touch and running out of time" when Americans are losing their jobs, homes and savings.
Tonight's setting for the debate is unique, a town hall meeting in which NBC's Tom Brokaw will serve as moderator, selecting questions from an audience of 100 to 150 Nashville voters identified by the Gallup polling company as undecided in the election. Brokaw will also draw on more than 6 million questions from voters who have already e-mailed them in.
Under a 31-page agreement hammered out by lawyers for both sides, the two candidates will sit on stools six feet apart on a horseshoe-shaped stage. They are free to roam the stage but are not supposed to entertain follow-up questions. Nor are cameras allowed reaction shots.
With the stock market still in free fall and the world economic picture unsteady, and with the presidential campaign increasingly personal, both sides suggested this morning that even the tight format rules may not prevent a showdown.
