The Press, a Few Dollars Short

"Their relationship has become a touchstone for opponents of Mr. Obama, the Democratic senator, in his bid for the presidency. Video clips on YouTube, including a new advertisement that was broadcast on Friday, juxtapose Mr. Obama's face with the young Mr. Ayers or grainy shots of the bombings.

"In a televised interview last spring, Senator John McCain, Mr. Obama's Republican rival, asked, 'How can you countenance someone who was engaged in bombings that could have or did kill innocent people?'

"More recently, conservative critics who accuse Mr. Obama of a stealth radical agenda have asserted that he has misleadingly minimized his relationship with Mr. Ayers, whom the candidate has dismissed as 'a guy who lives in my neighborhood' and 'somebody who worked on education issues in Chicago that I know.' "

It's a fair issue, but also an old one. And Palin is suddenly a fan of the Times, the McCain campaign's least favorite newspaper:

"No more Ms. Nice Gal," reports the Chicago Tribune.

"Sarah Palin is pulling out the stops -- in the aftermath of the running mates' debate, the Republican vice presidential nominee today accused the Democratic candidate for president, Barack Obama, of 'palling around with terrorists.'

"She was talking about William Ayers, a professor of education at the University of Illinois in Chicago now who was one of the founders of the Weather Underground in the 1960s, a group that took credit for protest bombings during the Vietnam War including blasts at the Pentagon and Capitol.

"Obama, who was a child at the time, has in more recent years served on boards with Ayers, an education reformer now. And, while opponents have tried to suggest that Obama's association with the one-time radical is a problem, Obama and others have denounced the past activities of Ayers while praising his recent work."

The AP says Palin's attack "was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext."

Palin, who now seems to talk exclusively to righty pundits, tells Bill Kristol that hitting Obama with Jeremiah Wright is perfectly legitimate -- but it's up to McCain.

Is the NYT training its guns on McCain? Here's what ombudsman Clark Hoyt found:

"Since late August, when the two presidential tickets were formed, The Times has published nine enterprise or investigative articles about McCain -- four on the front page -- taking tough, critical looks at some aspect of the candidate or his campaign. They included reports on the hasty, last-minute vetting of Palin, distortions or misstatements of fact in McCain's television ads, and his love of gambling and ties to the industry. In the same period, there have been four such pieces on Obama, one on the front page."

Aha! But if you use a longer time frame, "the Times has published more tough articles on Obama, 20, than on McCain, 13, since the beginning of last year."

Fred Barnes says Palin's performance in St. Louis was more meaningful than we realized:

"She may have passed two other tests as well. Did she once more energize the conservative base of the Republican party as she had when McCain picked her a month ago? Probably. And was her performance strong enough to change the direction of a campaign that has seen Barack Obama widening a lead over McCain in recent weeks? Maybe.

"For sure, she did one remarkable thing aside from handling Biden with ease. She undid the negative impression that had been created by her avoidance of most of the media and hardened when the two TV interviews went poorly. Her image was that of someone unqualified to be vice president and uninformed on major issues.

"Changing an image overnight is difficult. Ronald Reagan managed it when he debated President Jimmy Carter in 1980 and blew away the widespread notion that he was a warmonger. But I can't think of other examples of this, at least in presidential or veep debates."

Okay, but Karl Rove says Obama has reached 273 on the electoral map.