Shelf life of McCain’s no-guilt-by-association campaign pledge: 43 days, give or take

Back on March 14, the McCain campaign pledged that it would stay above the guilt-by-association politics then being directed at Barack Obama for the remarks of Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Steve Benen recalls the details:

About a month ago, lobbyist Charlie Black, John McCain’s senior campaign advisor, said the McCain campaign would not go after the Democratic candidates on the basis of guilt by association. The Dems might try it with McCain, Black said, but that’s just not the way McCain operates.

“What Senator McCain has said repeatedly is that these candidates cannot be held accountable for all the views of people who endorse them or people who befriend them,” Black told a national television audience, adding, “John McCain believes is that Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton should be held accountable for their public policy views, the things we’ve described before, big government versus smaller government.”

And now?

• Last Friday, as Eric Kleefeld wrote at TPM, the McCain campaign  took after Obama for having won words of praise from a Hamas official, which the McCain folk happily transmuted into an “endorsement.”
• Steve Benen further notes that McCain’s people also brought up Obama’s fleeting professional association with former Weatherman Bill Ayers.
• And McCain has taken up Wright-bashing as well, claiming he has Obama’s permission. But Media Matters points out that the McCain campaign was already circulating clips about Wright when it made its no-guilt-by-association pledge in March.