During the flight yesterday afternoon from Grand Rapids, Mich. to Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Steve Schmidt, Mark Salter and Nicole Wallace pulled back the curtain--or two--separating business-class cabin of John McCain's Straight Talk Air from the traveling press corps' coach accommodations and spent some time talking to a small pool of reporters. Much of what they said was standard talking-point stuff: swipes at Obama's response to the current financial crisis; explanations of McCain's plan to reform Social Security; a preview of the campaign's upcoming economic policy rollout. But one thing Salter said stood out, at least to me. Referring to the media's recent round of McCain-centric factchecking and hand-wringing--Time's Joe Klein called one of the senator's new spots "the sleaziest... I've ever seen in presidential politics"--Salter demanded that the same level of scrutiny be applied to Obama's latest ads and attacks. "Never litigated," he said. "Never litigated on the front page of your paper. Or anywhere else. Just ours. Just ours. All we’re asking is for the same standard."

My first inclination was to dismiss Salter's complaint as part of Team McCain's ongoing effort to discredit all criticism of its candidate by discrediting the messenger--i.e., the MSM. There's no doubt that strategic objectives--read: stoking the fires of resentment among the media-hating masses--partially account for Salter's accusations of "unfairness." That said, a quick tour of Obama's current anti-McCain messaging efforts make it clear that, whatever the convenience of the claim, the guy's got a point. And that doesn't bode well for the next president--whoever he is.

The most egregious example of Obama's shifting strategy is a new Spanish-language ad called "Dos Caras." Airing in the crucial Southwestern swing states of Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada, the spot attempts to equate McCain with Rush Limbaugh on immigration. As a picture of the conservative talk-radio host appears onscreen beneath a pair of bigoted-sounding quotes--"Mexicans are stupid and unqualified" and "Shut your mouth or get out"--the announcer says that "they want us to forget the insults we've put up with, the intolerance." He continues:  "They made us feel marginalized in a country we love so much. John McCain and his Republican friends have two faces. One that says lies just to get our vote and another, even worse, that continues the failed policies of George Bush."

The main problem here is that tying McCain to Limbaugh--especially on immigration reform--is deeply unfair. It's not just that McCain broke with his party and nearly torpedoed his presidential bid by co-sponsoring last year's failed comprehensive reform bill at the same time Limbaugh was regularly lambasting immigration reform and expressing hostility toward illegal immigrants on the air. It's that Limbaugh actually opposed McCain's candidacy because of his stance on immigration. He still doesn't care for the Arizona senator. What's more, the quotes from Limbaugh are taken out of context. As ABC News' Jake Tapper points out, the "larger point" of the first one--while "not one of [Limbaugh's] most eloquent moments, to be sure"--was that "NAFTA would mean that unskilled stupid Mexicans would be doing the jobs of unskilled stupid Americans."  Offensive, sure--but consider it an equal-opportunity slur. The second quote, meanwhile, was part of a riff mocking Mexican law--not a call to Mexicans "get out" of America. To imply that McCain agrees with these twisted quotes when he doesn't even agree with Limbaugh on immigration is absurd. Has McCain moderated his immigration rhetoric for political reasons? Absolutely. But even blogger Andrew Sullivan--Obama's No. 1 fan--says that "Dos Caras" crosses the line. "Playing racial politics this way is not what Obama promised to do," he wrote yesterday. "Cut it out."

Obama's other offenses are less outrageous--but they're misleading all the same. In response to a new McCain ad that tries to saddle Obama with disgraced former Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines by claiming that Raines has given Obama "advice on mortgage and housing policy," Obama spokesman Bill Burton unleashed a howitzer blast of outrage in Crystal City's general direction. "This is another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth," he said. "Frank Raines has never advised Senator Obama about anything--ever." That might be true. But the problem is that it contradicts a July Washington Post profile of Raines (cited by McCain in the ad), which reported that Raines has "taken calls from Barack Obama's presidential campaign seeking his advice on mortgage and housing policy matters." As the New Republic's Jason Zengerle--another Obama supporter--concludes: "Seeing as how neither Raines nor the Obama campaign bothered to contradict that information when the article came out, and didn't do so until only after the McCain ad aired, you can't really blame the McCain campaign for trying to make hay of the situation. And you certainly can't accuse it of dishonorably telling a lie."

Then there's whole "McCain supported tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas" line of attack. Constantly repeated in Obama and Biden's stump speeches, the riff reappears in a new ad called "Sold Us Out" that accuses McCain of "selling out" American workers. The spot makes McCain sound as if he's offering a special tax break for companies to move jobs offshore. But as the nonpartisan researchers at Politfact.com have noted, "that's not quite how it works." While it's true that McCain has voted to retain a long-standing principle of the U.S. tax system that allows companies that keep their profits overseas to defer domestic taxation indefinitely, the only actual "tax break" that McCain is currently proposing is one that would lower the top corporate tax rate from 35 percent to 25 percent. According to his advisers, that cut would actually encourage U.S. companies to return home. "If the tax rate were lowered on businesses in this country, businesses would bring money back," Carly Fiorina recently told ABC. "The reason they cannot bring money back is because the tax rate is so high." (Incidentally, Obama has indicated that he'd be open to reducing the coporate tax rate as well.) Agree or not with Fiorina's reasoning, the bottom line is that it's "not really" true--Politifact's words, not mine--to suggest that McCain "supports tax breaks for companies that ship jobs overseas." Which is exactly what Obama is doing.

Last but not least is regulation. On the stump yesterday in New Mexico, Obama called McCain a new convert to the cause. "When I was warning about the danger ahead on Wall Street months ago because of the lack of oversight," he said, "Senator McCain was telling the Wall Street Journal -- and I quote -- 'I'm always for less regulation.'" There's definitely some truth here, as I wrote earlier this week; not only has "McCain has dramatically ramped up the regulatory rhetoric in the wake of the meltdown on Wall Street... [but] Obama made the argument about the need for increased oversight much earlier." In general, McCain has taken an anti-regulatory approach to the market that's consistent with his fiscal conservatism. But as the the Washington Post editorial board pointed out this morning, Obama's attack is deceptively "one-sided." After telling the Journal in March that he was "always for less regulation," McCain was quick to add that "there is role for oversight"--especially in response to "the subprime lending crisis," where people "game[d] the system" and "engaged in unethical conduct which made this problem worse." As the Post notes,"when it comes to regulating financial institutions and corporate misconduct, Mr. McCain's record is more in keeping with his current rhetoric":

In the aftermath of the Enron collapse and other accounting scandals, he was a leader, with Sen. Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), in pushing to require that companies treat stock options granted to employees as expenses on their balance sheets. "I have long opposed unnecessary regulation of business activity, mindful that the heavy hand of government can discourage innovation," he wrote in a July 2002 op-ed in the New York Times. "But in the current climate only a restoration of the system of checks and balances that once protected the American investor -- and that has seriously deteriorated over the past 10 years -- can restore the confidence that makes financial markets work."... In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac -- while Mr. Obama was notably silent.

My point here is not to claim that Obama's misleading attacks are somehow worse that McCain's. Most of this stuff is child's play compared to the whole McCain-sponsored "lipstick on a pig" kerfluffle, which I characterized as "idiotic" and "condescending." And I agree with National Journal's Stuart Taylor, Jr., that the Arizona senator "has lately been leading the race to the bottom" of the barrel. What's more, Obamans have a point when they say their man has the right to fight fire with fire. It would be political suicide for Obama to allow McCain to keep hitting below the belt without landing a few low blows himself. But that's precisely the problem. If you'll recall, the general-election campaign began with paeans to the "politics of civility" and promises from both candidates that they would "break the partisan gridlock in Washington" once elected. Now, not so much. The shift to polarization and distortion was probably inevitable. But as Peggy Noonan notes in her latest column, "it invites charges of winning bad. And if you win bad in a 50/50 nation, it makes it really hard to govern."

In other words, neither McCain nor Obama should expect to find a helping hand when he "reaches across the aisle" as president. A clenched fist is more like it.

UPDATE, Sept. 23: The Washington Post's Ruth Marcus has more, explaining why "Obama has been furthest out of line... on Social Security, stooping to the kind of scare tactics he once derided." Read the whole thing. The key idea, however, is in the kicker: "To Democrats who worry about whether their nominee is willing to do whatever it takes to win: You can calm down." Many political partisans will see this as a good thing. But there's no denying that it'll make bipartisanship a more elusive goal if/when Obama arrives in Washington--assuming it was ever attainable to begin with.