Candidates victims of own campaigns

Back in the winter, after Iowa and New Hampshire but before Super Tuesday, I ventured in a column that Sen. Barack Obama and Sen. John McCain would end up the nominees.

It was about the only thing I got right.

"On Super Tuesday it may not come down to Iraq, or terrorism, or the economy, or immigration," I wrote. "What will matter is whether a big enough chunk of the American electorate decides the most important thing is that those issues be dealt with by a post-partisan president.

"Barack Obama has been called the post-partisan candidate, but Republicans have one too in John McCain.

"It is difficult to picture either of them smearing an opponent, or letting backers do the smear. If supporters outside their campaign tried the kind of swift-boating that blew up Sen. John Kerry's candidacy in 2004, can anybody imagine Obama or McCain failing to react quickly, loudly and insistently to demand the operation stop?"

Turns out, yes, we didn't have to imagine.

As we now know, the same swiftboating Jerome Corsi who wrote the lies in the 2004 book "Unfit for Command" has followed up with the equally mendacious "Obama Nation."

And as we also know, John McCain dismissed the whole thing with a casual "Gotta keep your sense of humor." Talk about failing to "react quickly, loudly and insistently."

But it's not just the reaction to outside supporters. Once upon a time, both the Obama and McCain campaigns seemed too honorable to roll in the mud, too invested in the idea of post-partisanship to run attack ads, too respectful of the issues before the American public to fall into silliness.

But now we get McCain comparing Obama to Paris Hilton. Childish? Inane? Yes, and sadly, effective.

Obama has not exactly remained above it all, either. His campaign jumped on McCain's gaffe about not knowing how many houses he owns, and inside a couple of hours had its attack spot.

It is all disappointing to American voters who believed that there was some chance that this race for president would be different. After all, we had two men who seemed unafraid to buck the orthodoxies of party discipline.

McCain stood up for immigrants at a time when much of his party was foaming at the mouth, even to the point where his presidential aspirations fell into serious jeopardy.

Obama, for his part, has challenged Democratic orthodoxy in affirmative action, and has talked of his willingness to use American military power in ways that must frighten the kneejerk anti-war left.

It's that willingness of both men to cross party lines that last winter made voters hopeful both candidates would conduct clean, issue-oriented, postpartisan campaigns. A lot of the votes that Obama and McCain received came from that hope -- and helped both men past rivals who were seen as old-school politicians.

They may owe their victories in primaries to the post-partisan vote. But now they have betrayed the postpartisan electorate. It looks like this presidential race won't be so different after all.

The candidates, kidnapped by their campaigns.

— Roger Hernandez is a syndicated columnist and writer-in-residence at New Jersey Institute of Technology. R e ad his blog at www.rogerhernandez.blogspot.com.