Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall offers a great summary on the whole ACORN fiasco that’s got Republicans seething. The allegation is that ACORN, a shadowy organization backing Obama (another community organizer!) is backing a massive voter fraud effort, to cast fake votes and therefore steal the election away in key swing states from McCain.

In short: ACORN is a program committed to increasing voter registration, particularly those in low-income and minority neighborhoods. The program doesn’t rely on volunteers; they provide work and income for people who need the money. Since the workers are paid per number of registrations turned in, there is an incentive to turn in fake registrations. And some do.

In many states, voter registrants are required by law to turn in every single registration form they receive to county clerk offices. ACORN will sift through the forms turned in by their workers, and try to flag obvious fake registrations. But they still have to turn in every form they get.

Perhaps they should refine their methods. After all, ACORN is the organization getting ripped off, paying workers for registrations that don’t exist. The bottom line is that there has never been any evidence to demonstrate that these fake registrations will result in actual voter fraud. Logistically, it’s just not feasible - you have to round up enough individuals to show up at the polls, presenting fake names (and fake IDs), and even if you managed to do that, there’s no guarantee that these voter mercenaries will even vote for your candidate. If you were going to commit voter fraud on a scale massive enough to sway an election, far easier and more efficient to hack a Diebold machine.

In fact, remember all those Bush-appointed attorneys that were wrongfully fired? It was because they couldn’t find or would not fake this evidence.

I have not been as concerned as some about assassination attempts on Obama, because I’ve trusted that the Secret Service knows what it’s doing. After all, we have a sitting president with an approval rating below 30%, sending people’s kids in harm’s way for an equally unpopular war - and I’ve not heard of any serious attempts on Bush. So I’ve trusted that the suits with the earpieces can competently do their job and shield the potential first African-American president from any unhinged nuts with too much time on their hands.

But this week, seeing the McCain and especially Palin rallies sent an absolute chill down my spine. McCain/Palin supporters yelling “terrorist”, “traitor”, and even “kill him!”, and one guy actually waving a stuffed monkey with an Obama sticker on its head — they’re getting nigh indistinguishable from Klan rallies. Finally, at a Friday event, McCain made a half-hearted attempt to shut down some of the craziness that he and his campaign have been fueling all week. He was promptly booed for this faint injection of decency by his own supporters.

Now I don’t believe for a second that McCain buys into the fears stoked by his own campaign about Obama. And I suspect it wasn’t his decision to use this strategy, so much as his handlers and campaign managers - particularly Tucker Eskew, a consultant who had worked for GWB in 2000 and who was the very architect of that vicious “illegitimate black baby” smear against McCain. But what does that say about McCain’s ability to lead, if he can’t control the direction of his campaign, or of his supporters? And what does that say about him, that he would be willing to join forces with the same despicable people who’d slandered him and his family back in 2000? To slander the Obamas?

In contrast, Obama’s rallies have been largely uplifting and positive. Of course this is probably an artifact of a winning campaign; if your guy is winning, you’ll naturally tend to be happier and more charitable towards the loser. But I do think a lot of credit has to be given to the Obama campaign’s message control, and that Obama has by and large set that positive tone for his supporters.

The fact is, McCain has nowhere to go but negative. At this point he is not winning on issues that matter, particularly the economy, and desperate efforts to throw conflicting solutions are not bolstering confidence. Nearly 100% of McCain’s ad buys are negative, attacking Obama rather than making the case for McCain.

It doesn’t look like this is a winning strategy for McCain, and I’m confident at this point that our next president will be Barack Obama. I do fear very intensely, though, that McCain’s current “attack Obama’s character and accuse him of being a terrorist” strategy will incite desperate racists to do something crazy. God forbid something happen to Obama. But in the event that something did, I will remember this week, and John McCain’s silent acceptance of the hate-mongering surrounding him.

You can read Frank Rich’s take on this in his column in yesterday’s New York Times.