A reader sends in a nasty mailer that just hit Philadelphia-area in-boxes, blasted out by a GOP group called the Republican Jewish Coalition, suggesting that a vote for Barack Obama could lead to another "tragic outcome" for the Jewish people.

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"Concerned about Barack Obama? You should be," the mailer warns. "History has shown that a naive and weak foreign policy has resulted in tragic outcomes for the Jewish people."

The mailer helpfully notes that the image is a pic of Obama speaking in Germany.

That's the first page of the mailer, and according to the reader, the second page (which we don't have) goes on to hit Obama as weak and naive over his willingness to meet with hostile foreign leaders and his allegedly anti-Israel advisers. The mailer is a reprise of an earlier print advertisement that the group ran that made those points.

The mailer is similar to another viral email smear that has been making the rounds in the state: Last week the Pennsylvania GOP was forced to disavow an email to Jewish voters likening a vote for Obama to the events leading up to the Holocaust. Here you have the same point being made in blazing color.

A reader sends in this mailer by the Pennsylvania GOP which hails Hillary for the feminist breakthrough her candidacy represented -- displaying an affection for Hillary that is somewhat atypical for Republicans -- and even likens John McCain to the New York Senator.

The mailer, a bid for Hillary voters in Pennsylvania, features McCain and Hillary gazing at each other above a testimonial to Hillary's 18 million votes, a picture of Sarah Palin, and even an evocation of Hillary's criticism of Obama during the primary: "Both she and John McCain have shown the American people proven results, not pretty words." Click on the images to enlarge:

Responds Hillary spokesperson Kathleen Strand: "It is safe to say Hillary Clinton does not approve this message. She made history earning 18 million votes and has urged everyone who supported her to vote for Barack Obama because they have so much more in common with him than they do with Senator McCain. Voters should not be distracted by last minute, desperate attempts that claim otherwise."

The AFL-CIO tries to broaden the map for Obama, dropping a big blitz of mail attacking McCain and Bush on the economy in West Virginia, a state that went for Bush over Kerry in 2004 by double digits.

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McCain doesn't appear to be biting on such stuff yet, though: He has cut a radio ad specifically geared for the state, but for now it doesn't appear to be running.

The Obama-backing labor federation Change to Win is about to drop some 750,000 mailers in the battlegrounds slamming John McCain and George W. Bush for having "wrecked our economy," with a fun play on the question, "how do they look themselves in the mirror?".

A Change to Win official sends over an advance copy (click on the images to enlarge):

Change to Win says this is their second largest mail drop to date; it's going out to a dozen battleground states.

It really is worth noting that between mailers, ads, phone calls and shoe-leather house-to-house organizing, the big unions did play a key role in staking out an aggressively populist left-flank for Obama -- and against McCain -- in the key states, well before the meltdown hit.

The AFL-CIO keeps up its intense and very targeted economic assault in the swing states, dropping half a million copies of this mailer hitting John McCain on a host of issues important to retirees, a key swing constituency.

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The AFL official who sends over the mailer says this mail blitz, combined with an intense door-to-door effort, represents the final push in the union's efforts to target three constituencies: Gun owners, vets and, now, retirees. The above mail is going only to retirees, who represent a key umber of undecideds in the battlegrounds.

One other interesting note: The AFL is dropping this piece, and is now sinking additional resources, into Indiana and North Carolina, in addition to the core swing states, suggesting that the big unions, too, are seeking to broaden the map in the race's final stretch.

A scorching new mailer authorized by the McCain campaign directly questions Obama's patriotism by saying he put the interests of "Hollywood above America" during the bailout negotiations, and ratchets up the "celeb" attacks by saying he "partied with Hollywood's elite" at a time of national crisis.

The mailer -- sent in by a reader in Virginia -- uses these attacks to stir fears of Obama as a vaguely sinister other with a questionable background, closing with this stark warning: "We need a President who puts America first. Barack Obama. Not who you think he is."

Mystifyingly, the mailer shows Obama alongside familiar bogeywoman Barbra Streisand, but also...Leo DiCaprio. Click on the images to enlarge:

The mailer, the latest in a huge wave of under-the-radar attacks from McCain that depart from the McCain campaign's public message, is an amped up version of the robocall we reported on the other day that made similar accusations. It was paid for by the RNC, but authorized by the McCain campaign.

A reader in North Carolina sends in a harsh mailer that the Republican National Committee has dropped in the state featuring fellow Dems questioning Obama's ability to lead (click on the images to enlarge):

The two marquee quotes, natch, come from Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, and both, unsurprisingly, are from the primary -- a line the GOP has used against Obama before.

Separately, it's pretty astonishing just how much cash and resources the Republicans are being forced to dump into this southern state, one that hasn't voted for a Dem for president in over three decades -- favorite son Jimmy Carter, in 1976.

A bunch of you have written in to say that the cropped image in the Virginia GOP flyer depicting Dems as appeasers of terrorists, which we posted on below, is actually Osama Bin Laden.

Here's a stock picture of Osama, next to the flyer's pic:

If this is indeed the source of the flyer's picture, note that in the flyer's reproduction, the skin is darker, the words artfully cover up the nose, which is faded, and the beard appears much lighter, so that it's like a facial shadow.

Keep in mind that the chair of the Virginia GOP was the one who made national news the other day for comparing Obama and Osama by saying that "both have friends that bombed the Pentagon."

Given that, it seems fair to at least wonder if this is an Osama pic shaded to ambiguously resemble Obama.

As noted below, we asked a Virginia GOP spokesperson who the image is, and he couldn't immediately say. We've checked in with him again to ask if the pic is a photoshopped version of Osama, and we'll let you know when we hear back.

In the race's final stretch, much of the real sludge and slime that floats to the surface will be the work not of the campaigns but of under-the-radar operations run by state parties and the like.

Here, for instance, is a new mailer from the Republican Party of Virginia that has to be seen to be believed. It hits Dems -- and by extension, Obama -- for wanting to appease terrorists and rogue leaders.

But the key is the last page, which displays a man who looks like Obama but with the same dark and sinister aspect as the bad actors depicted elsewhere in the mailing. Note the words superimposed over his face (click on the images to enlarge)...

How about those eyes, huh? Here's the rest:

We asked Virginia spokesperson Gerry Scimeca whether the likeness to Obama was in fact the Illinois Senator, and he said he couldn't immediately say. Asked to defend the mailer, he said: "It's about the fact that the world is evil," he said, referring to the multiple bad actors that populate the planet. "Choosing a president is about standing up to them."

To our eyes, the ambiguity over whether the image is that of Obama is alone telling. Meanwhile, Raising Kaine has the lowdown on the mailer's multiple distortions.

The Republican National Committee is hitting households in North Carolina with a tough new mailer that contains a striking juxtaposition: It combines an image of someone with a white hand on his heart next to a flag pin, along with the following slogan: "It used to be easy to recognize patriotism."

The mailer was sent our way by a North Carolina reader (click on the images to enlarge):

To be sure, the mailer's main patriotism hit is an attack on Obama and Joe Biden over Biden's recent claim that it's "patriotic" for top-earners to pay higher taxes for the good of the country.

"Obama-Biden calls paying higher taxes `patriotic,'" the mailer says. "Sounds mixed up. But it shouldn't be surprising -- Barack Obama loves high taxes."

So the mailer isn't directly questioning Obama's patriotism. But the mailer's imagery seems like a clear allusion to the viral smears holding that Obama doesn't wear a flag pin and refused to put his hand on his heart during the pledge of allegiance. That seems particularly clear given the slogan about it being harder to recognize patriotism these days, which also seems like a subtle attack on Obama's "otherness."

What's more, this mailer comes to light on the same day that we learned of an RNC-McCain robocall in multiple states accusing Obama of putting "Hollywood above America," suggesting that a broad attack is underway on this front.

The RNC didn't respond to a request for comment.

A scorching new mailer from AFSCME keeps up labor's economic assault on John McCain, directly blaming McCain and Bush for presiding over "the greatest financial meltdown since the Great Depression."...

The AFSCME official who sent us the mail piece says it'll be dropped today on undecided and swing households in 17 battleground states. Another forthcoming AFSCME mailer hitting McCain on health care is after the jump.

Meanwhile, in other outside-group news, Catholics United has a very interesting new mail piece that pushes a liberal pro-life vision that espouses improved health care and education, among other things. We're told it will go out to targeted Catholic households in Pennsylvania and Ohio.

Read more »

With the big unions unleashing their final pushes in the battleground states, the Communication Workers of America is blitzing the battleground states with over 120,000 mailers painting McCain as a stooge of big corporations and sharply contrasting him to Obama on the economy.

A CWA official sends over the mailers. The first takes a shot at "the pundits," calling on voters to "ignore" them and instead focus on the two candidates' records, which are contrasted in a tidy chart (click on the images to enlarge)...

The second piece focuses only on McCain and hits him over his "fundamentals" gaffe...

Late Update: CWA spokesperson Candice Johnson gets in touch to point out that the mailers are really a small part of the story when it comes to the work the unions are doing in the battlegrounds.

"CWA is focused on one-on-one worksite contacts, phone calls, and canvassing," she emails. "These mailers are really the tip of the iceberg. We deliver a lot of information to our members on the issues that they care about."

Micro-targeting is the name of the game in this election, and the AFL-CIO is about to unleash one of its most micro-targeted pushes yet -- a blitz of mailers defending Obama on gun rights that's aimed strictly at union households made up of gun owners.

Here is the first mailer, a piece going to some 80,000 gun owners in Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. It offers a stout defense of Obama on gun rights and ties it directly to an economic message (click on the images to enlarge):

"I want to protect two things: My job and my gun," union member Mike Day says in the mailer. "That's why I'm supporting Barack Obama."

The union's decision to depart from a strictly economic message and to edge into the culture wars is driven in part by a stepped up campaign in the battlegrounds by the National Rifle Association, which has run ads accusing Obama of conspiring to take away people's guns.

The new mail piece is the latest in a broad effort by the AFL-CIO to reach very specific voting blocks in the swing states. Last week the union unleashed a wave of mailings targeting union households with veterans, and union officials promise an intensified -- and targeted -- campaign of mailers, phone calls and door-knocking in the race's final stretch.

The American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees keeps up the economic assault in the swing states, blitzing a dozen battlegrounds with two new hard-hitting mailers tying McCain to George W. Bush on the economy and lambasting McCain's health care plan.

An AFSCME official sends over the mailers, the first of which hammers McCain for his "fundamentals" gaffe and claims that Bush-McCain policies are "killing the middle class" (click on the images to enlarge)...

"You have a right to know about John McCain's economic record," the mailer reads, reflecting internal union polling that shows low-information swing-state voters lack a strong sense of McCain's ideology and proposals on the economy.

Meanwhile, a second mailer hits McCain's proposal to tax health care benefits, the central target of efforts to paint McCain as the risky and even frightening choice on this crucial pocketbook issue. Also note the word "Republican" in big and garish green letters...

Working America, the arm of the AFL-CIO that does outreach to nonunion workers, keeps up the economic assault on John McCain with another huge, hard-hitting mailing targeting the battleground states (click to enlarge):

Also, in an interesting experiment, the AFL-CIO tells me that they'll be emailing this video out to a list that includes thousands of Republicans and Independents in the swing states -- "a persuasion piece," as AFL spokesperson Steve Smith puts it.

The thing to keep in mind is that the ratcheted up activity by the big unions is driven partly by the fact that their own internal polling indicates that the race is much more volatile in the battlegrounds than public polls suggest, and that low-info voters there tend to be surprised when they learn the truth about McCain's economic proposals.

Late Update: The mail piece is going out to more than a million swing-state households, and the vid is the first in a three part series.

As part of its new big push on health care, the Obama campaign is unleashing a massive blitz of mailers attacking John McCain's plan, an assault that includes multiple mail pieces that do everything from accusing McCain of lying about his plan to quoting doctors fretting about McCain's approach.

The mail pieces -- all of which are going to households in the battleground states -- are in keeping with the Obama campaign's strategy of painting McCain as the economically risky and even frightening choice at a time when public anxiety is fixed squarely on the economy, just as public fears centered on national security in previous elections.

Here, for instance, is one that accuses McCain of deceptively concealing the real aims of his plan (click on the images to enlarge):

The other mailers after the jump.

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The AFL-CIO -- which has taken on a lead role in trying to persuade working class voters in swing states to vote their economic interests -- keeps up the economic assault on John McCain with this new mailer in battleground states hammering McCain as rich, out of touch, and a disaster on health care.

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The mail, which will be dropped in Colorado, Virginia, Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and Florida, features Ohio union worker Dave Fecke hammering McCain as "rich" and saying "he doesn't get it" on kitchen-table issues.

The mail piece, which doesn't mention Obama, signals the start of a new and aggressive campaign by the union to target McCain in those key battlegrounds by speaking to worker anxieties about health care with more mailers, phone calls, and door-to-door canvassing, AFL-CIO spokesperson Steve Smith says. Health care, of course, is an increasingly urgent issue on its own for financially pinched families, as well as a kind of proxy for larger anxieties about the state of the economy in general -- anxieties that McCain has failed to address, polls show.

"McCain's practically had free health care his whole life," Fecke says in the mail piece. "He doesn't understand how hard it would be for my family to pay more."

The stakes of such efforts are particularly high in the slower-growing states of the industrial midwest, where polls show Obama gaining but still not at the point where he's put these states way, despite the economic collapse.

In the latest effort by the big unions to try to fill the gap left behind by the absence of third-party spending on the left, the AFL-CIO is hitting the Rust Belt states with a massive mail blitz hammering John McCain over his claim that the "fundamentals" of the economy are "strong."

This mailer will go out to more than one million union households in the swing states of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania (click on the images to enlarge):

The piece is the latest sign of just how up for grabs Reagan Dems remain in the key battlegrounds -- and the urgency the big unions feel about the need to off-set McCain's ongoing populist makeover, via ads and speeches, in these critical states.

The Obama campaign keeps the focus on McCain and the economy by going local, spotlighting the plight of workers who were fired after a Corning plant closed in Pennsylvania...

How's this for a blast of ancient history: This Corning plant was actually also the subject of a mailer that Obama dropped during the campaign hitting Hillary for supporting normalizing trade relations with China.

The initial mailer was somewhat misleading, wrongly implying that Corning itself had shipped the jobs overseas. But the current spot doesn't repeat those errors, instead saying (accurately) that some of the workers were hired to ship the materials to China.

The ad is running in Pennsylvania and in other key states.

The AFL-CIO and an affiliated independent group are preparing to unleash an unusually large blitz of mailers targeting at least 1.5 million households in battleground states and across the country -- the group's first foray in a new and all-out campaign to win back Reagan and Bush-supporting Dems in the race's final stretch.

The mailer, which we obtained in advance of its public release, features testimonials from a number of these workers, including a school bus driver and Marine veteran who articulates the campaign's core message: "I voted for George W. Bush because he promised to change Washington. I'm not falling for the same old line from John McCain."

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The mailer is the first big move by an outside group called Working America, which gets funding from the AFL-CIO and is the union's affiliate for non-union workers.

Working America is a group that bears watching. It's going to be doing a fair amount of heavy-lifting when it comes to winning back blue-collar "Reagan Democrats" who supported Bush in 2004 and risk being seduced by McCain's claim to being the race's real change agent -- hence the mailer's message.

Working America and the AFL-CIO will blast out the mailer next week to some 270,000 households in the swing states of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Michigan, and to another 1.3 million union households in those states and across the country.

"This is a new front in the effort to reach working-class moderates on the pocketbook issues that are critical to them this election year," Karen Nussbaum, Executive Director of Working America, tells us.

"Our members have seen their living standards decline, their communities decay and their economic security disappear," Nussbaum continues. "Yet John McCain still thinks the fundamentals of our economy are strong."

The group -- which claims 2.5 million members in 11 states, including 800,000 in Ohio alone -- plans more mailers and on-the-ground organizing in the weeks ahead.

In a move that signals a major new effort to woo elderly voters to Obama, the AFL-CIO is dropping a scorching new mailer in battleground states hammering John McCain on Social Security and directly referencing McCain's wealth, his corporate jet, and his expensive Italian shoes.

"McCain's worth over $100 million," reads the mailer, which we obtained in advance of its public release. "He owns 10 houses...he flies around on a $12.6 million corporate jet...he walks around in $520 Italian loafers."

"If John McCain lost his social security, he'd get by just fine," the mailer continues. "Would you?" Click on the images below to enlarge:

The new mailer, which highlights McCain's history of support for privatizing Social Security, signals a recognition that unions can play a role reaching out to what they think will be a pivotal swing state vote: Retired union members.

Steve Smith, a spokesperson for the AFL-CIO, tells me that the union will be striving to reach out to more than a million union retirees in coming weeks.

"In key battleground states, the retiree vote is going to be crucial in the presidential race," Smith says. "Our research -- polling, focus groups -- indicates that many seniors still are unaware of John McCain's record in support of privatization and plans to drastically reduce benefits."

The mailer will go out tomorrow to 50,000 retirees in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan, and more mailings will soon be dropped in those states, where the union is also planning a series of Social Security events.

The mailing's hard-hitting references to McCain's wealth also suggests that the big unions see another role for themselves: Striking a sharp populist tone in attacks against McCain that others have been calling on the Obama camp to employ, particularly in response to McCain's "celeb" ads. The message, quite simply, is: Who's the real elitist here?

In a sign that the big labor unions are about to ratchet up efforts to woo Rust Belt union Dems towards Obama, the AFL-CIO is set to blitz four swing states with a pair of mailers targeted directly at blue collar swing voters.

The first one is the more interesting one: It seeks to dispel a host of false rumors about Obama that could be proving worrisome to working class whites, including the falsehoods that he's a Muslim and doesn't show sufficient deference to the flag (click on the images to enlarge)...

The second mailer is a more straighforward testimonial to Obama's labor record, and the mailers will go out in the next couple of weeks to about 600,000 swing voters in Michigan, Wisconsin, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, according to AFL-CIO spokesperson Steve Smith.

More broadly, the mailers signal the start of an aggressive new campaign by labor in the swing states, where unions hope to get their membership fully behind Obama and thus function as a kind of "firewall" for Obama in working class swing-voter territory, Smith says.

"We're ramping up our efforts to really define Senator Obama among union voters, especially in these key Rust Belt states," Smith tells me, noting that the union's membership is "still learning about Senator Obama" and will be targeted by a campaign to tell them "exactly who Senator Obama is, what he supports, and why he's right for working families."