When republican officials or CNN/FOX "news" persons say things like, "the Al Qaeda wing of the Democratic party...." or "Ned Lamont is the Al Qaeda candidate", they have at least two aims in mind. One is obvious: they want to associate their opponents with the enemy. They want you to look at Ned Lamont's face and feel fear.
A less obvious aim is to suppress general voter turnout. Normal people are SUPPOSED to be disgusted by hearing this kind of crap and naturally they will react to it the same way they'll react to anything disgusting, like road kill -- they'll avoid it and try to forget they ever saw it, and assume someone else will clean it up.
But that doesn't explain why they haven't just gone negative, they've gone nuclear. Why so vicious so soon, and why the naked politicizing of terror? It seems risky -- why take that risk? And is it possible that they've miscalculated hugely?
I have to divide voters into two groups to make sense of this. One is the evangelo-wackos, the extreme right that thinks Jesus is going to swoop down and scoop them from the flames engulfing the nonbelievers when the Rapture comes, or whatever. Those people will be only be more encouraged to turn out for the GOP when they hear Tony Snow calling Ned Lamont a card carrying member of Al Qaeda. They actually believe there is literally an Al Qaeda wing of the Democratic party.
The group that the republicans are trying to keep away from the voting booth includes everyone who might be likely to vote against them (duh). For example the soccer moms who, while they feel genuine heartbreak from sympathy with mothers in Iraq and Lebanon whose dead babies show up "on our television screens", might not be too hard to keep away from the polls in November if the campaigns are surrounded by a reeky Rovian miasma.
As far as why it's gone so negative so fast, I think it's simply because there's so much chatter about an "irate middle" and "anti-incumbent sentiment" and the polls reflect that too. And the 60% figure is real. The GOP strategizers have to go nuclear on the negativity because they see the potential for a large turnout. I could be wrong though, and not that it matters too much but I like to try to come up with plausible explanations for things.
In the end I think it's doomed, mostly because their message is blatantly incoherent -- they're screwing around in Iraq while UK police stop actual Al Qaeda terror suspects from blowing up planes, at a cost substantially less than the Iraq war. Approximately how many terror networks have our military adventures dismantled again? And what's Bush doing, other than spying on Quakers? Riding his bike around joggers on the ranch.