Dangerous Territory

THE TONE is ominous, the shadings dark. "Who is Barack Obama?" asks the latest campaign advertisement from Sen. John McCain. "He says our troops in Afghanistan are 'just air-raiding villages and killing civilians' . . . How dishonorable. . . . How dangerous. . . . Too risky for America."

Here's what Mr. Obama actually said about Afghanistan in August 2007: "We've got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we're not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there." The gap between that reality and the McCain ad -- not quite a lie, yet not a fair representation, either -- is where the campaigns seem to be heading with four weeks to go until the election. Gov. Sarah Palin accused Mr. Obama "palling around with terrorists." The Obama campaign retaliated with a 13-minute video about Mr. McCain's involvement in the two-decade-old Keating Five scandal, emphasizing words and phrases such as "betrayal" and "destroying trust." Issues are out, character assassination is in.

Character is legitimate campaign fodder -- up to a point. Is there something to be learned from Mr. Obama's association in the 1990s with William Ayers, the unrepentant domestic terrorist to whom Ms. Palin referred? It's certainly not that Mr. Obama hates America or shares responsibility for the bombing Mr. Ayers helped carry out. By the time Mr. Obama came on the Chicago scene, Mr. Ayers was a member of the liberal political establishment that Mr. Obama sought to join. Maybe someone of stronger character would have decided not to go with that flow -- not to join a foundation board with Mr. Ayers or allow him to host a political coffee. It's an arguable point, maybe a small brushstroke in a full portrait of Mr. Obama, in any case hardly disqualifying to his candidacy.

Similarly, the Keating savings-and-loan scandal, in which Mr. McCain was accused of poor judgment but no crime, is a legitimate topic. The Obama campaign is off-base in seeking to tie it to today's financial meltdown on the basis that Mr. McCain was and remains an ideological foe of regulation. As we've written here before, his record is far more complex, including advocacy of stricter accounting standards after the Enron scandal and stronger regulation of housing giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. But Mr. McCain himself has talked about the shame he felt in his Keating Five involvement and how it impelled him to a greater attention to ethics in his subsequent career. It's a brushstroke, or two, in his political portrait.

But the relevance of character can't excuse an anything-goes assault. Mr. Obama's use of the word "just" in his statement on Afghanistan was inartful. But Mr. McCain knows perfectly well that Mr. Obama doesn't believe U.S. troops are killing only civilians. He also knows perfectly well that the problem Mr. Obama described -- the alienation of Afghan civilians by military tactics that lead to too many civilian deaths -- is real and demands a rethinking of strategy. What's dishonorable in this case is the McCain ad, not the Obama statement.

And while character counts, issues do, too, or should. In the debate tonight, we'd like to hear each candidate explain how he would unfreeze global credit markets if he were in charge now and how he will restructure financial regulation if he is in charge four months from now. We'd like to hear the candidates debate their very different cap-and-trade proposals for controlling global warming, their ideas for controlling health costs, their thoughts on immigration and homeland security, and what they would do with captured terrorism suspects once the Guantanamo Bay prison has been closed. We'd like to hear, in other words, about not just what each did 10 and 20 years ago but what he would do as president.