Campaign mud got here before Santa

All the cards were postmarked from South Carolina, but featured a photograph of the Boston Public Garden and said, falsely, that they were being sent by a Mormon temple in Boston.

Then there was PhoneyFred.org, a website that featured pictures of Fred D Thompson in frilly clothes and said that he was 8220;once a pro-choice skirt chaser8221;. That site was later taken down, after protests from the Thompson campaign.

At the moment, e-mail is flooding into South Carolina 8212; after having appeared in Iowa and New Hampshire 8212; alleging that Barack Obama is Muslim, which he is not, and questioning his patriotism, based on a photograph in which he does not have his hand over his heart as the national anthem is being played.

South Carolina has had a long, and infamous, tradition of hardball political attacks, involving scurrilous allegations and whispering campaigns that, while false, are hard to disprove and politically damaging.

Some of these attacks are from identifiable groups, like the ones on Romney from organisations critical of his position on abortion, which has gone from support to opposition. But others float through the Internet and telephone lines and are impossible to trace.

On the Democratic side, the most spirited defensive effort is being waged by the Obama campaign after an increase in e-mail falsely stating that Obama attended a radical Islamic school as a child in Indonesia, and that his parents raised him as a Muslim so he could run for President and subvert the government.

Obama is a Christian and attended a nonreligious public school in Indonesia.

B J Welborn, a volunteer for Obama, said that she had recently noticed more comments about Obama8217;s supposed Muslim ties when making phone calls on his behalf.

8220;We don8217;t know where it is coming from,8221; Welborn said. 8220;We have a lot of fact sheets, and we direct people to the Obama website. But some people don8217;t want to listen.8221;

The Obama campaign has asked its supporters to forward any e-mail messages they get along these lines.

8220;We are less concerned about chasing ghosts on the Internet,8221; said Josh Earnest, a spokesman for the Obama campaign here, 8220;than ensuring that the pernicious attacks don8217;t gain any credibility with the voting public8221;.

Among Republicans, Mike Huckabee is a target of attacks from two groups in particular. Perhaps the most emotionally charged attacks are television advertisements from a group called Victims Voice, whose political connections are not known. The spots feature the mother of a young woman, who was raped and killed by a convict who was paroled, while Huckabee was governor of Arkansas and whose prison release Huckabee had agreed to.

The commercials are being broadcast in South Carolina and on the Internet and were shown during a Fox News debate. On them, Lois Davidson, the mother, says, 8220;If not for Mike Huckabee, Wayne Dumond would be in prison and Carol Sue would be with us.8221;

The RACE

In South Carolina

Republicans

John McCain held firm overnight at 29 per cent, with Mike Huckabee sliding one point to 23 per cent. Fred Thompson climbed two points to move into third place at 14 per cent

Democrats

Hillary Clinton is leading Barack Obama by 40 per cent to 32 per cent. John Edwards is in third place with 13 per cent according to a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby poll