It’s a reasonable question, what with Sheriff Mike Scott of Lee County, Florida stroking the mob with this gem: “On Nov. 4, let’s leave Barack Hussein Obama wondering what happend! (sic)” The divine Sarah, when she arrived at this rally, would stroke the mob still further by evoking the ghosts of Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright, claiming Obama’s associations with these men to be proof positive that her “opponent” is not a real American.

Of course. this tactic is designed to play into the racist hate campaign that has been waged against Obama on the Internet since the beginning of his rise to prominence, and there are apparently some voters who might still be persuaded. At least since the Nixon years, a substantial part of the Republican equation has required persuading some Americans to vote against their own economic and political interest. So, nobody should be surprised.

But I always am — surprised, that is. I wish that the Obama campaign had not felt it necessary to bring up the Keating Five. But I suppose that retaliation, or some other evocation of McCain’s complicated past, was required. What’s more interesting than that, though, is the way McCain seems to be trying to reinvent himself, sort of any which way he can. Here are some of Ben Smith’s thoughts about that.

I’d always thought McCain’s great strength in defending the Keating affair was that he’d acknolwedged making a huge mistake, and spent his career repenting by recasting himself as a reformer.

So when his campaign puts his lawyer on the line with reporters to contest the details of a congressional inquiry that, largely, let McCain off the hook, doesn’t that cloud the sin-confession-atonement dynamic a bit?

In Halperin’s account, McCain lawyer John Dowd described McCain’s “former relationship with Charles Keating as ‘social friends,'” and called the situation a “classic political smear job on John.”

Dowd also “thinks that the committee went too far in suggesting that McCain�s intervention with regulators was poor judgment,” Halperin writes.

But if so, what’s this giant mistake that transformed McCain into a reformer?