On the contrary, they go hand-in-glove with the extreme leftism of his Senate voting record (No. 1, to Ted Kennedy's No. 2 and Joe Biden's No. 3). He is hardly the moderate mainstreamer he presents to the voters with his Mr. Smoothie rhetoric. He got his start in the company of radicals and the corrupt - and if the press won't vet the past of "this fellow of strange associations" (in the words of Hollywood actor Jon Voight), then McCain and Palin must. You might look at it as providing a service to the voters.

The voters seem to be making up their minds the other way - in favor of Obama.

Maybe. But mid-October trends can change - as those such as Jimmy Carter (against Gerald Ford) and Bill Clinton (against George Bush I) have demonstrated. Obama cannot come clean about his early years, any more than John Kerry could. Truth would blow their careful cover stories. Fact would belie the fictions.

So Obama is lying?

Obama is the issue - his associations, his straightforwardness about them, his judgment in maintaining them over long periods, his character. Sarah Palin sees Obama as trying "to talk his way into the White House." John McCain says regarding Obama, "Perhaps never before in history have the American people been asked to risk so much based on so little" - so little in tangible legislative accomplishment, so little straight talk about his dubious associations.

Yet why do those associations really matter?

No one has put it better than Charles Krauthammer: "The window these associations give on Obama's core beliefs." And: "He doesn't share Rev. Wright's poisonous views of race nor Ayers' views, past and present, about the evil that is American society. But Obama clearly did not consider these views beyond the pale. For many years he swam easily and without protest in that fetid pond."

Without fuller explanation from Obama himself, it's hardly a stretch - hardly extreme - to conclude he swims there still.