COLUMBUS — This campaign for president has gone biblical.

Democrat nominee Barack Obama and Republican John McCain have added their own verse to the admonition about punishment.

"Eye for an eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot," it says in Exodus in the King James Version of the Bible.

In the book of McCain-Obama, they've added "smear for smear."

Between Sept. 28 and Oct. 4, Obama spent $17.5 million nationally on TV ads, compared to just under $11 million for McCain and the Republican National Committee combined, according to the University of Wisconsin Advertising Project.

During that week, 100 percent of McCain's ads and 34 percent of Obama's followed the "smear for smear" scripture.

Sarah Palin, McCain's vice presidential running mate has said Obama "is someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect, imperfect enough, that he's palling around with terrorists."

The terrorist in question is William Ayers, a founder of the 1960s Weather Underground terrorist group that carried out bombings of federal buildings.

Obama's campaign, meanwhile, has been suggesting that McCain used to "pal around" with Charles Keating, the disgraced savings and loan executive.

The Keating and McCain families did hang out in the 1980s and McCain was one of the "Keating Five" senators investigated for improperly intervening on Keating's behalf with federal regulators.

Republicans love to rail about the 1960s, as they did with Ayers and Obama, and right now McCain will do anything to take voters' minds off the rotten economy.

Democrats love to hook up their opponents with devious fat cats, as they did with McCain and Keating.

With the country in financial turmoil and Ohio hemorrhaging jobs, smears about who McCain or Obama did or didn't "pal around with" might not mean much to worried voters, hungry for answers to real problems.

If that's the case, the campaigns' haven't gotten the message.