Matt Yglesias

On the Tire Swing

Apparently on ABC this morning Mark Halperin was arguing that housegate would ultimately wind up being bad for . . . Barack Obama because . . . all news is good news for John McCain it “opened the door” to Rezko, Ayers, Wright and other attacks on Obama.

Not only is this silly in a first-order sense, the underlying premises that a door needs to be opened for McCain to deploy those kind of attacks is bizarre. Nothing was stopping the McCain campaign from “going there” with misleading Rezko- or Ayers-related arguments before this happened. They just weren’t doing it because they didn’t think it was the correct time, strategically, to raise those issues. But you’d have to be extraordinarily naive to believe that the McCain campaign was genuinely just not going to mention any of this stuff until Mean Ol’ Barack came along to make fun of the idea of being so rich that you can’t keep track of your mansions. And whatever you may say about Halperin, he’s not a naive guy.