A great deal has been written about whether the recent ads by the McCain-Palin ticket are “factually accurate,” “highly misleading,” or “just plain lies.” Whoever thought we could have a “calm, respectful general election campaign” “without biased distortions of the other candidate’s record” (I mean you, John McCain!) must have been smoking something at the time.

However, the now famous “sex education for kindergarteners” ad signals something more than just another tortured distortion of slender facts to win an election - it could point toward a crazy spiral that could backfire on John McCain much more than any fact-checker’s quibbles about whether this spot falsifies Obama’s action in question.

Let me take a step back to discuss a seminar that I offered in Fall 2007. I taught a course on “U.S. Senators Running for President.” The issue, as I explained it repeatedly to the students, was to understand why forty-four senators ran unsuccessfully for president between 1960 and 2004 without any of them winning. Of course, in one sense, my timing could not be worse because we were standing on the cusp of the first race in our history between two sitting Senators. Unless Bob Barr or Ralph Nader makes a miracle run, a senator will win the presidency in 2008. However, even though we will elect a sitting senator this year, many of the points that we explored in that class still hold today, and that brings us back to the “sex ed” advertisement and the can of worms it may open.

As a State Senator in Illinois, Barack Obama did vote for a “comprehensive sex education” bill that did include funding and guidance for “age appropriate” sex education for kids in kindergarten. The kindergarten and early elementary elements of that program were aimed at protecting children from sexual predators. Obama did not sponsor or write the bill and voted for the bill only in committee; he was urged to do so by the state PTA and other nonpartisan groups; the bill never came to a vote on the floor, did not pass, and did not become law. Nevertheless, the McCain ad claims that sex education for kindergarteners was Obama’s greatest education “accomplishment.”

I don’t know who told McCain that this would be a great ad, but from my point of view, it may prove to be a great error.

As my students looked at the nearly inevitable failure of senators running for presidents, they time and time again discovered how senators paid a high price for votes taken out of context. In the crazy legislative maneuverings of the world’s most complicated legislative body, senators are forced to take votes all the time on multiple versions of the same bill, cloture motions on bills they favor but that they know cannot pass (and voting against cloture one day lets you reopen the issue on another), motions to recommit bills to committees, and highly contrived, no chance to pass, politically motivated floor amendments. Even if you have not served in the Senate for long, you will quickly face lots of votes that are nearly impossible to explain to anyone who does not work in the U.S. Senate.

So, after 26 years in the Senate, does John McCain really want to open the door to twisting votes out of context? If this becomes the pattern of the race and every committee vote, cloture vote, or amendment tree vote can be counted as one of your “accomplishments,” it will be possible to cite roll calls in which McCain voted against funding for troops in the field; against benefits for injured veterans; for deregulating Merrill Lynch, Lehman Brothers, and Bear Stearns; for dozens, if not hundreds or thousands, of earmarked spending projects; and for raising middle-class taxes.

In a race between two senators, the greatest check on vote spinning like the John Kerry “I voted for the 87 billion before I voted against it” debacle was mutually assured destruction. With both candidates facing similar votes and similar legislative perils, they had good reason to play it straight. Each had a great deal to gain by sticking to critiques of only serious votes that tracked the candidates’ actual priorities and principles, and each had a great deal to lose if the race turned to cynical spinning of every vote “against” an amendment that was meant to advance the measure or votes in committee that were aimed at keeping negotiations rolling. If anything, McCain, who has served longer in the Senate and promises a higher standard of principled purity, the risk was greater.

Now he has made it clear that a vote “for” anything makes it one of your accomplishments and a vote “against” anything means that you, perhaps single-handedly, killed the measure. If Obama decides that he is going to play this game, things may get very complex and interesting. The fact-checkers better get ready to unearth some very well-buried committee minutes, and voters better decide how they will deal with the discovery that both candidates were for everything before they were against it and against everything before they were for it. The losers will probably be the voters who will be barraged by “facts” that mean nothing stripped of context and that can only muddy the waters about the candidates’ real positions on real issues.