Senator John McCain, trailing Senator Barack Obama by as much as 6%-8% in the most recent polls, decided on Monday to do what many conservative and other supports in the media and blogosphere argued for days: take the gloves off. According to these individuals, McCain’s reluctance to use Obama’s connections and past (record) against him were one of the main reasons for McCain’s downfall in the polls, especially because, these individuals argued, Obama’s campaign and allies in the media left no stone unturned in the battle against McCain and Governor Sarah Palin.

It was reported yesterday that McCain did not want to use Obama’s connection to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac against him, nor the economic crisis, because he was afraid of being depicted as a racist. Obama’s and his allies’ response to Palin’s attack, that Obama was ‘palling around with terrorists,’ however, seems to have convinced McCain that the race card will be used against him no matter what.

In response to Palin’s allegation, Obama’s campaign and his allies accused Palin of racism. Hours later, a project was launched accusing McCain of involvement in a controversy in the late 1980s and early 1990s, also known as the “Keating Five.” According to several investigations, McCain was not culpable for any wrongdoing, yet the Obama campaign planned to use the controversy against Obama nonetheless. Additionally, McCain, so McCain and his allies argued, learned from his past mistakes, and became a ‘maverick reformer’ precisely due to the ‘Keating Five’ controversy.

So today McCain’s campaign decided to take the gloves off and to take Obama to task for connections with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and responsibility - together with the Democratic Party as a whole - for the crisis in the financial markets. It was reported on Monday that McCain would deliver a speech in which he would accuse Obama of malpractice.

“This crisis started in our housing market in the form of subprime loans that were pushed on people who could not afford them. Bad mortgages were being backed by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was only a matter of time before a contagion of unsustainable debt began to spread. This corruption was encouraged by Democrats in Congress, and abetted by Senator Obama,” McCain will say later today according to the text of the speech as prepared for delivery.

“Senator Obama has accused me of opposing regulation to avert this crisis. I guess he believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed. But the truth is I was the one who called at the time for tighter restrictions on Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac that could have helped prevent this crisis from happening in the first place.”

He will, according to the text, go on to say: “Senator Obama was silent on the regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and his Democratic allies in Congress opposed every effort to rein them in. As recently as September of last year he said that subprime loans had been, quote, ‘a good idea.’ Well, Senator Obama, that ‘good idea’ has now plunged this country into the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.”

“To hear him talk now, you’d think he’d always opposed the dangerous practices at these institutions. But there is absolutely nothing in his record to suggest he did,” the Senator from Arizona will go on to say in front of a friendly crowd. “He was surely familiar with the people who were creating this problem. The executives of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac have advised him, and he has taken their money for his campaign. He has received more money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac than any other senator in history, with the exception of the chairman of the committee overseeing them.”

“Did he ever talk to the executives at Fannie and Freddie about these reckless loans? Did he ever discuss with them the stronger oversight I proposed? If Senator Obama is such a champion of financial regulation, why didn’t he support these regulations that could have prevented this crisis in the first place? He won’t tell you, but you deserve an answer,” he is expected to conclude.

The new line of attack is risky in so far that the public believes that the financial crisis has been created by ‘the greed of Wall Street’ and Wall Street’s Republican enablers in Washington, D.S. Most people, rightly or wrongly, believe that Republicans not Democrats carry the grunt of responsibility for the current crisis facing the country and the world. McCain, then, will focus the attention on an issue that is considered to be harmful for Republicans and thus himself and he will have the tremendous task to convince voters that their previously held beliefs were incorrect.

Additionally, McCain’s concern that attacking Obama may very well backfire because Obama’s allies will accuse Republicans of using ‘the race card,’ may very well prove correct. It is more than likely, considering recent history, that Obama and his allies will indeed try to make this case. Where race was once a tool to be used against black politicians, it is now not productive any longer. Instead, those who are perceived racist stand no chance whatsoever of winning.

McCain’s campaign clearly believes, however, that the risks do not outweight the potential benefits of aggressive attacks against Obama. As a result, the political debate will become even dirtier than it already was. Then again, trying to put the blame solely on McCain and his allies would be dishonest for one could very well defend the thesis that McCain was forced to go negative due to the attacks against him and Palin, carried out by the Obama campaign itself and its allies in the media and so-called ‘blogosphere.’