Getting down and dirty

San Francisco: The political hunting season for presidential candidates has arrived early, and already it features a new level of mudslinging and cage-match attacks.

A Republican website, meetbarackobama.com, has a daily "Audacity Watch" on Democratic candidate Barack Obama - including a takeoff on a Facebook page (www.barackbook.com) that features Obama "friends" like Tony Rezko, the Chicago fundraiser who was convicted of fraud, and William Ayres, a founder of the 1960s violent radical group the Weathermen.

The Democrats this week launched the Exxon/McCain '08 campaign, complete with website, bumper stickers and slogans ("Oil Companies First"). They also created thenextdickcheney.com, a site that details the weaknesses of potential Republican vice presidential candidates and, oh, while you're here, how about a contribution to the Democratic Party.

Tell-all books

There is a barrage of new attacks from both sides and a roster of new tell-all political books, like Obama Nation by Jerome Corsi, whose Unfit for Command led to the swift boating of John Kerry four years ago. Despite despite dozens of factual challenges Obama Nation has managed to ride up the best-seller list.

With just over two weeks until the national conventions - and just 90 days until the general election - the barrage of back-and-forth has kicked off debate and hand-wringing among Democrats.

With the Illinois senator coming off a tough two weeks, and McCain's team managing to land some crucial punches and get traction in the polls, should Obama - who sells himself as a breath of fresh air and a breed apart from old school, negative politics - take out the brass knuckles?

Some Obama backers - noting that McCain chief strategist Steve Schmidt has finally put his stamp on the campaign - want their candidate to start punching back harder.

"Steve Schmidt is showing himself to be a brilliant strategist," said a leading, and frustrated, Democratic political consultant this week, who did not want to be identified. "They went right at the Obama celebrity and mocked it. They injected the race card and they put us on the defensive on offshore oil drilling. McCain is now setting the agenda in the old-fashioned way, showing that hardball politics almost always win."

"They need to attack McCain," said the consultant, "and make him the issue".

Wrong time to panic

Obama supporter and leading Silicon Valley fundraiser Wade Randlett disagreed and said Democrats can't panic now. "The McCain people are laying bait and not landing blows," he said. "The dirtier, the meaner, the nastier and the more traditional this campaign is, the better off they are. The more this is about a better kind of politics - hope and change - the better off we are."

The current set-to began late last month as Obama ended his media-event European trip, prompting Team McCain and the Republicans to launch an aggressive media war to get voters' attention.

There was a double-punch of ads - one showed Charlton Heston's Moses declaring Obama "The One," the other attacked Obama for being "the biggest celebrity in the world" and managed to work in an image of Paris Hilton.

Then McCain campaign chairman Rick Davis said the Democratic candidate's wry observation that he looks different from most other presidential politicians constituted dealing the race card "from the bottom of the deck".

Next: The distribution of the "Obama Energy Plan" tyre gauge symbolised what Republicans called the shallow symbol of the Democrat's policy - his call for Americans to save oil by improving their tyre pressure.

Obama hasn't exactly been sitting still and just taking the incoming fire. Team Obama fought back with tough jabs at McCain - four more years of George Bush - in campaign appearances and with his first negative ad of the general election campaign, asking whether McCain was "the original maverick - or just more of the same" regarding energy problems and high gas prices.

Not surprising tactics

Political science professor Mark Petracca of the University of California at Irvine says McCain's attack mode "isn't so surprising" and has been savvy in technique.

The commercials skillfully aim to "reduce Obama to the status of a pop star," he said. "'They're saying, "who cares if he's popular? That's not what the country needs."

Petracca says such strategies hardly constitute the positive campaign that McCain promised, but "if didn't work, they wouldn't do it".

Republicans associated with McCain's team, such as California strategist Adam Mendelsohn, say there's nothing negative about it: In recent weeks McCain's team weeks has simply been rejuvenated and found its message.

The traction with voters comes because "they've found an effective line of discussion about Barack Obama," he said. "And it's a perfectly legitimate line of questioning: Is he ready to lead?" An average of polls at Realclearpolitics.com shows the gap between the candidates narrowing in the past two weeks, with Obama still leading.

Democratic strategist Chris Lehane countered that Republicans and McCain are merely "pursuing the only path available to him, however slim - and that is trying to combat the winds of change by trying to raise questions about Obama."

Lehane, who was the spokesman for Al Gore's presidential run in 2000, says the current Republican playbook mirrors how George W. Bush and Schmidt, who managed the Bush war room, "changed the 2004 campaign from a referendum on a sitting president to a referendum on (John) Kerry."

But it's a mistake to try for a sequel, Lehane argues.

"There are two big differences between 2004 and 2008," he said. "First, Obama is a superior candidate in terms of his skills and strategic understanding of how to win; and, second, the winds for change in 2008 compared to 2004 is like a tornado compared to a breeze."