The Politico reports that several Republican insiders are urging the McCain campaign to go even more negative than it has already, with a specific concentration on his ties to Jeremiah Wright:

GOP officials also believe that a sustained attack on Obama’s ties to his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, scandal-stained businessman Tony Rezko and former radical war protester William Ayers could sway undecided voters. Among those goading McCain to be more aggressive is Tennessee Republican Party Chairman Robin Smith, who said that “people need to see a gladiator who’s willing to defend what exactly he stands for.” “We’re not talking, for instance, about the radical associations that Barack Obama has, with Mr. Ayers, Tony Rezko and so on,” Smith said. “More could be done.” Murray Clark, the chairman of the Indiana Republican Party, said he is eager for Obama’s “troubling relationships” to be aired in his state. “I think those things will come up in Indiana again and they do have an impact on mainstream voters in Indiana. You call it going negative, [but] whoever … is in a position to point out these relationships, I think it’s helpful.”

McCain’s problem is that, right now, the public’s attention is focused elsewhere:

[T]he financial crisis will only exacerbate a right track/wrong track split – one of the statistical north stars of the public mood – that Republicans hoped wouldn’t get worse. “For the first time in American history, at least since Valley Forge, the right track of the country will be in single digits tonight,” predicted one longtime GOP strategist after Monday’s debacle. Sure enough, this strategist said that surveys taken since Monday in one of the reddest of red states showed that the right track number there had plummeted to single digits. Moreover, the saturation attention to the economy – always a weak spot for McCain and for the administration he’s tied to – has thwarted his effort to make the race a referendum on Obama, as public attention turns toward a global crisis and away from partisan attacks. McCain’s first signs of life only came after his campaign mocked Obama as a celebrity and sought to make the best of a race that had increasingly been defined by the Illinois Democrat. Then, thanks in part to Palin, McCain pulled even or took a lead in some polls after a convention that savaged Obama and featured only a brief video from President Bush and no appearance at all by Vice President Cheney. Now, with the financial crisis front and center, Bush has reappeared on the landscape and the race is no longer an Obama referendum.

Would a negative campaign focusing on Obama’s ties to a retired preacher be enough to divert attention from a story that is being talked about 24 hours a day on cable news ?

Perhaps, and it might even work, but, as Joe Gandelman notes, it would come at a cost for McCain:

There are some independent voters who’ll be turned off by this kind of attack and see it as trying to change the subject on the big issues on which McCain can make his case detailing his differences with Obama. And if it’s yet one more election won on demonization it means McCain, who has already burned his bridges with some Democrats and independents, will attain power but have part of the country passionately against him from day one and take power in yet another highly polarized, high personal political climate.

In other words, it would be a continuation of the politics of mutual assured destruction that we’ve lived with now, on a constant basis with only a short interruption in the wake of the September 11th attacks, since Bill Clinton first ran for President in 1992.

If that’s the only way that John McCain can win, then I’m not sure its worth putting the country through it all over again.