On Thursday, John McCain's campaign said Obama's ad mocking the candidate's multiple house confusion by saying the Democrat had "opened the door" to return fire with Tony Rezko and Jeremiah Wright.
Within hours, the McCain campaign made good on the first half of their promise by issuing a Rezko-themed attack piece. If it was meant to dissuade Obama from working McCain over on the housing issue, however, it failed. The presumptive Democratic nominee's campaign is now debuting its second ad in as many days on McCain's multiple houses. Entitled "Out of Touch," it bemoans McCain's "country club economics" and features a video clip of the Arizonan tooling around in a golf cart with former President George H.W. Bush, presumably while unaware of the number of houses he and his wife own.
In addition to the new ad, Democrats are holding events in 10 states today calling attention to McCain's housing gaffe. Regardless of McCain's Rezko counter, the Obama campaign clearly believes that it has the better half of the argument here -- perhaps since the candidate's ties to Rezko have been exhaustively aired during the primary race with Sen. Hillary Clinton, and did not do any fatal damage.
As former Hillary Clinton spokesman Phil Singer told the Huffington Post: "With Americans focused like a laser on the economy, counter-punching with a complicated real estate issue that has already been litigated ad nauseam isn't going to be very effective."
But it's not entirely clear that the Rezko attack has been bled of all its usefulness, either. "I think few people processed this from primary," said Democratic pollster Celinda Lake. "I think Obama is not that well defined, so Republicans are trying to do that. I think it's important for Democrats to push back because the key perception here is less elitism and more about lobbyists and corruption. That's what we need to push back on."
A representative from the Gallup polling firm backed up part of Lake's analysis, revealing that the Rezko issue never gained enough national traction for the firm to ask its respondents any questions about it. So while to political obsessives the Rezko issue may appear to be a dead letter, there's at least a chance that Obama could still be damaged by a wider airing of the connection.