Below The Beltway

It’s beginning to sound like John McCain is regretting the fact that his negative campaign has exposed some very raw emotions:

LAKEVILLE, Minn., Oct. 10 — At the end of perhaps the most charged and negative week of the presidential campaign, Sen. John McCain sought to tone down his rhetoric toward Sen. Barack Obama even as his running mate, allies and his own advertising continued to attack the character of the Democratic nominee.

On Friday, McCain urged a crowd of skeptical supporters at a town hall forum in this Minneapolis suburb to be respectful of his rival for the presidency despite their deep policy differences with Obama.

The Republican nominee drew a cascade of boos from the crowd when he called Obama “a decent person” and told an expectant father that he does not have to be scared if he is president of the United States.

“We want to fight and I want to fight, but we will be respectful,” McCain said, again prompting loud boos when he declared that he admires Obama’s accomplishments. “I want everyone to be respectful, and let’s be sure we are. . . . That doesn’t mean you have to reduce your ferocity. It’s just got to be respectful.”

At one point in the event, McCain grabbed back the microphone from an elderly woman who had begun to say that she didn’t like Obama because he is an Arab. “No, ma’am. No, ma’am,” McCain said. “He’s a decent family man, a citizen who I just happen to have serious differences with on fundamental questions.”

Here’s the video of that rather extraordinary exchange:

This comes on the same day that yet another report noted that the McCain campaign continues to honor the candidates earlier pledge not to make Jeremiah Wright an issue:

As John McCain’s campaign hits hard at some of Barack Obama’s past associations, one person closely tied to the Democratic candidate is conspicuously absent from the attacks: the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. It is an omission that some Republican strategists and McCain supporters find puzzling and frustrating.

In advertisements, in Web videos and on the campaign trail, McCain repeatedly heaps scorn on Obama for his ties to convicted Chicago financier Antoin “Tony” Rezko and to William Ayers, a former member of the Weather Underground, the violent 1970s radical group. The Republican nominee never mentions Wright, the controversial black minister once described by Obama as his spiritual adviser and whom some strategists see as better target than Rezko or Ayers.

McCain made it clear this spring, after Wright’s inflammatory sermons became a problem for Obama, that he was opposed to making the pastor a campaign issue. When the North Carolina Republican Party aired an ad using clips of Wright’s sermons to cast Obama as an extremist, McCain condemned the commercial at a town hall meeting.

“All I can do is publicly state that that is not in keeping with the tradition of the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan,” McCain said. “And I will bring every pressure to bear that I can to stop it.”

McCain deserves credit for trying to quiet the ferocity of the crowds, but his campaign is still stoking the flames even if he isn’t doing it in person:

[T]hroughout the day, McCain’s allies and advertising unleashed a flurry of attacks on his rival’s ethics, touting Obama’s ties to a Vietnam War-era radical and accusing him of being connected to a group accused of engaging in voter fraud.

He launched a tough new television ad linking Obama to William Ayers, a founder of the Weather Underground, which bombed U.S. facilities in protest of the Vietnam War. The narrator in the ad says Obama “lied” about his relationship with Ayers and accuses the Democrat of “blind ambition, bad judgment.”

Later, the McCain campaign hosted a conference call with John M. Murtagh, a target of a bombing linked to Ayers’s group, in which Murtagh accused Obama of lying “about the nature and extent of that relationship.”

At the town hall, McCain promised not to relent on tying Obama to Ayers, telling the crowd, “We’ll be talking about that more.”

Either McCain can’t see the connection between the increasingly and almost exclusively negative tone his campaign takes on a daily basis now and the more distasteful things we’ve seen from some of the crowds at this rallies lately, or he’s trying to play it both ways.

Well, you can’t have it both ways Senator. You either believe that your opponent is an honorable man that you happen to have disagreements with, or you believe he’s dangerous radical.

Which one is it ?