McCain has thrown the dice on a total-negative campaign. If he had more time, it just might work.
When I look back on the '04 campaign, I see some savvy differences in the way Rove and the boys ran their shit machine, compared to how McCain is running his.
Rove started lying early, and stayed constant. He had no bogus "maverick" image to consider. He just hit Kerry with a consistent background soundtrack, like the ones used by good horror movies. Not enough to be overtly conscious of at first, but slowly building. Knowing that the swift-boaters were coming, Rove expertly laid the ground work, so that when the crap poured out from the SB Vets, voters were ready to agree.
McCain did not have the discipline for that, and I really doubt that it can be done effectively in the time he has left.
Additionally, all the attacks McCain has to work with (that we know of so far) were chewed and digested months ago during the primaries. Hannity and his ilk did Obama a huge favor by making their Reverend Wright stink months ago. The only folks who care about it now were never going to vote Obama anyway.
That is not to say that MCCain will not score some hits, but I think it will all be small-bore, and the attacks will run out of steam in a couple weeks, just as Hillary's last-ditch offensive did. We still have two debates that will dominate the news cycle until well after the 15th. And the Obama team has internalized the main lesson of the Kerry debacle: never let an attack go unanswered, and better than that, launch your own attacks first. The Keating 5 movie released today proves that they are prepared to take the argument in a direction McCain does not want to go. And I wold bet there's more where that came from.
So, at this point I am not too worried about the latest McCain offensive. It shows that McCain has exhausted all other options, and his campaign has admitted as much. My hope is that he will spend an inordiante amount of money on attack-ads that don't move the numbers much, and not realize his mistake until it is too late.