But schoolyard defenses ("He hit me first!" . . . "He hit me harder!") should offer small solace to Obama fans. This is the man, after all, who won many to his cause by pledging to engage in a new kind of politics.
Instead, in recent days, Team Obama has been playing an old and painfully familiar game.
Obama told a bunch of old folks at a campaign stop in Florida last weekend, for example, that McCain wanted to divert much of their precious Social Security into the volatile stock market.
In fact, McCain backed a plan by President Bush to allow Americans to put some of their Social Security in private accounts. But the proposal would have been voluntary, applied only to a portion of funds in the retirement system and been open only for those born after 1950.
The Post's Marcus concluded that Obama had lowered himself to "the kind of scare tactics he once derided."
Obama & Co. targeted Latinos with another misleading ad. The Spanish-language spot tried to taint McCain as an immigrant basher by tying him to provocative statements made by Rush Limbaugh. One problem: McCain has taken a much more moderate position on immigration and citizenship than the talk radio host.
The New York Times helped expose the "misleading" spot and its smarmy "guilt by association" approach.
Yet another distortion comes via an Obama ad that claims McCain would "reduce oversight of the health insurance industry . . . . Increasing costs and threatening coverage." FactCheck.org is among such websites to point out that what the Republican actually proposed is allowing the sale of health insurance over interstate lines, in hope of reducing costs.
Don't expect either side to stop the distortions any time soon. Campaign operatives have boldly stretched the truth many times in the past, but they once might have backed off when confronted with the facts. Now, politicians and their handlers seem more shameless -- repeating canards that clearly have been exploded by the press. One such example: Sarah Palin's claim that she stopped Boondoggle Bridge in her native Alaska when the facts show she supported the project until it had no hope of being built.
McCain absurdly blames the deteriorating tone of the campaign on Obama. If only his young opponent had agreed to a series of town hall debates, McCain has said repeatedly, everything would be much more civil. Right.
Obama, meanwhile, keeps promising to change our politics. But his desire for change seems to keep tripping over his desire to win.
Journalists like Marcus who try to set the record straight often face angry, and sometimes profane, denunciations from true believers on both sides. And those zealots are convinced they are right. After all, there is always someone who agrees with them out there in that vast badlands, the Internet.
People "wrote to say how brilliant I was last week when I criticized McCain," Marcus said. And now that she's on Obama's case? "They're telling me what a complete idiot I am."
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james.rainey@latimes.com
