McCain goes negative
Well, McCain has had a bad week (though it wouldn’t be obvious to you if you were just watching the polls). There was of course Obama’s trip overseas, which gave him all the presidential photo-ops he could ask for. Obama got supported on Iraq by the Iraqi prime minister. McCain made more in a series of misstatements that would make most candidates look like they don’t understand key issues — except McCain, at least on foreign policy, is immune from that interpretation, so they just make him look old and generally out of it. No one can fault the McCain campaign for feeling a little bit desperate at the moment. I’m even willing to let them slide a bit for pulling stupid tricks like pretending they’re about to announce their VP pick in order to get attention.
I am not, however, willing to forgive the suddenly harshly personal tone that the campaign has taken. I have no problem with negative ads when they attack policy differences. I have no problem with negative ads on personal qualities that are relevant for governance (leadership experience, or intelligence, or whatever). I have no problem with negative ads that assault someone’s character when there are actual grounds for doing so. McCain’s most recent ad (below) is negative, personal, and has no basis in reality.
The main attack point of the ad is that Obama canceled scheduled visits to military bases in Germany. That’s true, but the reason the Obama campaign gave was that they were worried it was inappropriate to visit troops in the campaign-funded part of the trip. McCain’s ad says that Obama “made time to go to the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.” It then adds that “John McCain is always there for our troops.” Did the Obama campaign cancel the visit because of a lack of allowed cameras? Maybe. Anything is possible. But as far as I can tell, there is is no evidence to support it. (It’s the one statement about Obama in the ad that doesn’t have a citation appear on the screen for it.) Really, though, the thing about this ad that goes beyond mean into sheer idiotic is the picture in the background. It’s criticizing Obama for going to the gym instead of visiting troops, and it has a clip of him playing basketball. The only problem is, the clip is from his visit with US troops in Kuwait a couple days earlier! The people in the background are US soldiers. I really am at a loss for words here. I can’t do anything other than marvel at the amazing level of shameless, meaningless attack that is going on here.
This comes after McCain has started using the line that “It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign,” implying that Obama is choosing a popular position he knows is harmful to US security. I have said before that I think too much has been made of Obama’s early opposition to the war as a measure of good judgment, but at the very least it shows that this is clearly a positions he’s had since well before the presidency was remotely on the table, and that it’s not just political opportunism.
I don’t know why the campaign is taking such a personal tone all of a sudden. There has been a lot made of McCain’s supposed personal dislike of Obama, so it might just be that showing through. It might also be a calculated (and not unreasonable) political decision that in a year where a generic Democrat would clearly defeate a generic Republican, the only way for McCain to win is to make it personal. Nevertheless, it’s the kind of thing where you would expect better of McCain. The message here is supposed to be that Obama would do anything to win, but I think McCain is being much more successful in proving such a thing about himself than about his opponent. Those of us who value intelligent debate shouldn’t be surprised, but we should be sad.
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