It appears the McCain ticket's extra-vicious new attacks on Barack Obama, openly trumpeted by the campaign itself, have worked a little too well. The idea was probably to get people just riled enough to cheer wildly and vote Republican on election day — not to sound like a frenzied lynch mob that will make swing voters cringe. At left is a video (via Talking Points Memo) in which John McCain asks, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" and a supporter yells out, "Terrorist!" Watch as the Republican presidential nominee visibly grimaces, before quickly making his peace with demagoguery and moving on. That's more of a disgusted reaction, at least, than Sarah Palin reportedly gave when one of her audience members seemed to call for the death of her political opponent:

"And, according to the New York Times, he was a domestic terrorist and part of a group that, quote, 'launched a campaign of bombings that would target the Pentagon and our U.S. Capitol,'" [Palin] continued. "Boooo!" the crowd repeated. "Kill him!" proposed one man in the audience.

Obama has long taken lumps for the antics of his most overexuberant supporters, whether it's the video producers who made a creepy video of kids singing an Obama song or an overly deferential press corps that became the butt of a joke on Saturday Night Live. McCain now has a far more dicey problem on his hands. He and Palin are putting themselves on camera with downright lunatics, which is not only scary but would, uh, tend to undermine their point that Barack Obama maybe chatted with an ex-lunatic at some board meetings a few years ago.

This is why you launch these sorts of things anonymously, by direct mail and anonymous phone call, a week before the election. You don't notify the press a full month in advance and have the candidate deliver the message, personally, on camera. Unless maybe people are already mailing in their absentee ballots and you're really desperate and out of ideas. Hmm.