Progress Illinois

With time running out and the polls holding steady, a desperate John McCain is throwing the kitchen sink at Barack Obama. In that sink are a boatload of robocalls, a tactic he referred to as "hate calls" when they were used against him eight years ago. As with so many other issues this cycle, McCain has now flipped and is deploying them judiciously as part of an effort to raise concerns about his rival's "character."

One call suggests Obama can't be trusted to keep America safe because he "worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home and killed Americans." According to the folks at Talking Points Memo, who created a great interactive map detailing where McCain's slime is surfacing, the Ayers call has gone out to homes in neighboring Wisconsin, Indiana, Iowa, and Missouri. The call is so nasty that one Wisconsin resident quit his gig at a telemarketing firm whose job it was to conduct the calls. You can listen to it here.

Another popular call features a smear we know all too well: Obama is an "abortion extremist". Jessica Valenti at Feministing provides the audio here, which is reaching households in Wisconsin and Indiana.

To their credit, the Obama campaign has challenged McCain on his robo shenanigans, with Joe Biden asking McCain to "bring down those robo-calls" on Tuesday. "If it's about the economy, argue about the economy," Biden said, "not about Barack Obama's character." But with a campaign struggling to form a coherent message or dent Obama's lead, we shouldn't hold our breath.