There are two lamentable trends in politics these days: guilt by association and glory by association.

Both are cheap ways of getting attention.

The first category, guilt by association, happens when a candidate's friend, relative, business associate or even staffer is found to have some sort of defect. The defect could be a meaningful one -- say, an associate has a troubled financial history or a habit of frequenting prostitutes.

Glory by association happens when a celebrity (who historian Daniel Boorstin defined as someone well-known for being well-known) endorses a candidate. So Curt Schilling endorses John McCain (OK, Red Sox player Schilling is arguably known for more than just being well-known) and George Clooney endorses Barack Obama.

In the guilt by association scenario, the fact that a candidate is close, or not-even-so-close, to someone with a perceived problem becomes a problem for that candidate.

Last week, columnist Mona Charen wrote critically of Obama's friendship with Columbia University history professor Rashid Khalidi. For someone who calls himself a true friend of Israel, wrote Charen, "Obama also chose peculiar associates. ... Khalidi, a former director of the official press agency for the Palestine Liberation Organization who has called Israel an 'apartheid' state and defends the right of Palestinians to use violence against Israel, founded a group called the Arab American Action Network."

On the Columbia campus, Khalidi is hardly known as a firebrand; his dry, historical lectures have put more than one student to sleep. But as part of the continuing drive by his opponents to paint Obama as sympathetic to terrorists, Charen's linking of the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee to someone associated with the PLO is a way of creating guilt by association. Khalidi is sympathetic to the PLO, ergo his friend Obama is awfully close to a terrorist.

It's a bipartisan tactic, mind you.

Last week, Jim Johnson, who was leading Obama's search for a running mate, was attacked (rightly, we believe) for his acceptance of generous loans by a troubled mortgage company after he left his job leading huge mortgage lender Fannie Mae. He quickly left the campaign.

Now, Democrats have turned around and attacked McCain's vice presidential search leader who, they say, is a prominent lobbyist tainted by some of the same ties to Fannie Mae that Johnson was.

Yikes! A Washington insider who has been a lobbyist! How many powerful people in Washington can claim that they're not associated with a lobbyist in one manner or another?

We'll spend less time here on the issue of celebrity endorsements and the glory they're calculated to confer on candidates. Simply put, we think they're silly. What does it really mean that racing legends the Unser brothers endorsed presidential candidate Bill Richardson, who did not go on to win his party's nomination? Obviously, not a lot. Ditto for the pull of Steven Spielberg on the primary voters of this nation; E.T.'s director couldn't get them to come home for his anointed candidate, Hillary Clinton.

Who a candidate hires, who a candidate consorts with, who a candidate loves are a part of the whole picture that we must evaluate come Election Day, but those relationships are not the entire picture.

Legitimate questions can be raised about candidates who appear to be under the influence of those of low moral character. What is not appropriate is to make those candidates responsible for the behavior of their friends, family and associates.

If we insist on making that a requirement for voter approval, we will have candidates who are loved, befriended or advised only by saints. And that would be a mighty lonely world for them.