Will The Campaign Get Uglier?

Charles Pierce thinks so:

We are coming rapidly toward a devastating confluence of two colliding panics. The Romney campaign is panicking about itself, and the Republicans are panicking about the Romney campaign. He cannot come back from this, honestly. This is who he is. This is what he believes the world to be. Half the electorate already thinks he's a fake, which means he's not a very good one. There's really only one campaign left to him now.
Unfortunately for American politics, that means only one thing. It's going to get extraordinarily dirty extraordinarily fast. There is going to be pale birtherism and barely covert racism. The body of Ambassador Christopher Stevens is going to be exhumed and used as a bludgeon. There is going to be poor-baiting, and gay-baiting, and ladyparts-baiting, and probably baiting of things I haven't thought of yet. The polite part of the campaign is going to be Romney's effort to convince You that he was really talking about Them when he was calling people moochers and sneak thieves. He wasn't talking about Your Medicare or Your Social Security. Naw, he was talking about Their greed for what You have. That's going to be the polite part of the rest of the campaign, reinforced in the lower registers by a few million in ads to make sure You remember who They are.

I'm not sure what will be uglier, the rest of the campaign, or the aftermath of an Obama victory?  I'm leaning toward the aftermath.  All the people I've heard berating the President have taken for granted that, now that his "socialism" has been exposed, he's bound to lose.  When he doesn't, I think they will react very poorly.  But don't get me wrong, I think the rest of the campaign will be much uglier than the nastiness raised by Sarah Palin's "Real America" campaign in 2008.