By: Andy Barr

Conservative pundits are split over the decision by John McCain’s campaign to aggressively target Barack Obama’s association with 1960’s radical William Ayers with less than thirty days remaining before election day.

“McCain and his campaign now are acting out of frustration and a touch of desperation,” Norman J. Ornstein, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute wrote in a post on Politico’s Arena forum.

“With four short weeks to go, and a campaign where McCain is losing nationally, losing in the majority of the battleground states, with a diminishing number of hotly competitive blue state targets and an expanded number of red state ones, and with a campaign terrain dominated by economic turmoil, McCain needs to change the conversation.”

Pattrick Ruffini, a conservative blogger and strategist, likes the campaign’s aggressiveness in attacking Obama’s connections to Ayers and convicted land developer Tony Rezko, but thinks the timing is off.

“He should have been doing it back in July,” Ruffini posted on Twitter. “Starting now appears desperate.”

Conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, meanwhile, thinks the move is already starting to pay off, writing on Townhall that “Obama talking heads are hysterical with outrage, which is a clear signal to Team McCain to keep digging and swinging on the subject.”

The campaign has stepped up its attacks on Ayers in recent days. McCain’s running mate, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, has taken on the role of chief attack dog on the issue, aggressively hitting Obama over the association at campaign stops.

Palin accused Obama of “palling around with terrorists” Saturday after telling a crowd in Englewood, Colorado, that it is “time to take the gloves off.”

On Monday Palin called Ayers a “domestic terrorist” who was one of Obama’s “earliest supporters” during a speech in Clearwater, Florida.

Conservative scholar Yuval Levin doesn’t think the scrutiny toward Obama’s association is unwarranted.

“’Who is Barack Obama?’ is not an irrelevant question given the job Obama is seeking, and it’s a question he has sought mightily to avoid answering,” Levin wrote in an Arena post. “Obama’s close past connection to Ayers hardly seems an unimportant detail.”

Levin too defended classifying Ayers as a terrorist, writing that “Ayers and his wife Bernadine Dohrn are both admitted terrorists. Does the fact that they are not bombing the Capitol right now mean they are not terrorists right now? They have never expressed contrition or regret for their acts, and the Obamas pal around with them.”

“I think Governor Palin’s comments were appropriate and pertinent,” Columbia professor Charles W. Calomiris added in another Arena post. “It is certainly legitimate to judge someone running for president by his choice of business associates (or his choice of pastor, for that matter) since these reflect on a candidate’s ideology and character.”

While some conservatives were split over the move, comments from the left uniformly expressed outrage.

“McCain figures he cannot win on the merits so maybe he can sleaze out an Obama loss,” Democratic activist Christine Pelosi wrote in The Arena.

Michael B. Coleman, the Democratic mayor of Columbus, Ohio wrote in another Arena post that “for Sarah Palin to suggest that Barack Obama has been ‘palling around with terrorists’ is beyond the pale.”

But while the strategy may help McCain control the news cycle, former Hillary Clinton spokesman Howard Wolfson doesn’t think it will make a difference come Election Day.

“This is a big election about big issues. McCain’s smallball will not work,” Wolfson wrote on his blog The Flack. “Bill Ayers isn’t going to save John McCain. The race is over.”

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