With just four weeks until the US election, presidential politics is becoming a full-contact sport. Both candidates, John McCain and Barack Obama, have launched new character attacks, each claiming the other has been involved with shady figures in the past.

When it comes to contact sports, hockey might be the roughest. So, it was no surprise that GOP vice presidential nominee and hockey mom Sarah Palin was the first to throw the gloves down. Over the weekend, she brought up Obama's connections to William Ayers, a prominent leader of the Weather Underground, accusing the Democratic candidate of "palling around" with terrorists.



Ayers was a key member of the radical 1960s group, which bombed both the Pentagon and US Capitol. Ayers has since remade himself in Chicago into a community activist focusing on education issues, but his detractors say he was - and remains - a terrorist.

"It is appropriate that the prime vessel for this assault is Sarah Palin, whose very presence on a national ticket is an insult to your intelligence," writes columnist Joe Klein on his blog on the Time magazine Web site.

But Palin says she is just repeating what she's read in "The New York Times" - a newspaper the McCain camp has said is "in the tank" for Obama.



But the Times report she is referring to put no small amount of distance between Obama and Ayers, saying "...the two men do not appear to have been close. Nor has Mr. Obama ever expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers."

Still, some conservatives say they've been waiting for the McCain camp to start challenging Obama on his personal connections, and hope this means there's more to come.

"If this stuff doesn't take a chunk out of Obama, I could be convinced that Ayers and his kind actually won the war against America they started back in the '70s," writes Bill Dupray at the "Patriot Room".

Over at "Right Wing News", blogger John Stephenson writes that the Ayers connection means Obama's judgment can't be trusted. "Why would anyone trust Obama in choosing such an important position as the next Supreme Court Justice?" he asks.

Obama has in the past called these kinds of character attacks part of the "silly season" of politics. But he's not above it, either. This week, his campaign began reminding people of McCain's involvement in a savings & loan scandal as part of the "Keating Five" group of senators linked to central figure Charles Keating.



Some liberal bloggers are applauding this tit-for-tat approach.

"Bringing Keating into the mix shows how trivial McCain's smears based upon Ayers and Rezko are," writes Ron Chusid at the "Liberal Values" blog. "McCain had a much closer relationship with Keating than Obama ever had with Ayers."

But like the Obama connection to Ayers, there may be less than meets the eye when it comes to the McCain connection to the Keating Five scandal. While he was censured by the Senate for his role, the Democratic attorney in charge of the investigation did recommend that both McCain and Sen. John Glenn be dropped from the inquiry, finding them less culpable than the other three senators involved.

Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative magazine "National Review", writes on his blog that bringing up the connection to Ayers is fair game. But he also has a warning for McCain: that alone won't win him the presidency.

"McCain has to meet a higher standard," he writes. "Not having a compelling economic message before the financial crisis hit was malpractice; now it's madness."

We can expect more of this in the coming weeks. Expect to hear more Republican attacks on Obama's connections to disgraced fundraiser Tony Rezko, who has been convicted on charges of fraud and bribery (not related to Obama), and his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, whose comments about the nation outraged many.

Also expect to hear more about McCain's role in the Keating Five, and a possible link to a group that supported right-wing death squads in Central America. You might even hear about Todd Palin's membership in an Alaskan independence group that supports secession from the United States.

But will it work? Over at the "Right Wing Nut House", blogger Rick Moran predicts that it won't.

"The fact is, the economy is of such overriding concern, all else in the campaign pales in comparison," he writes. The voter simply doesn't want to hear about Ayers, Wright, Rezko or any other problematic Obama friendship. Nor, I suspect, are they keen to relive the Keating 5 fiasco or read about any other manufactured McCain association by the press."