The famous Hillary is the Truth Speaker and paid for it ad on the heels of the Paris Hilton/Britney Spears ad and the continual bashing of Obama without telling why you should vote for McCain in the same ads…
Do you suppose he even tries to justify the dichotomy?
I think Obama should run a “McCain… a man of his word… if the word is bullshit” series of ads. Or a Britney/Paris style ad with clips of Sophia from The Golden Girls or Yetta from The Nanny and Old Rose from Titanic with the announcement caption “Sure they can be feisty and its funny when they make off color or pop culture references, but do you really want one leading us? What if there’s a state dinner where soup and jello aren’t the main courses? OBAMA— because America deserves a president who won’t smell like vitamins and pee*”. *South Park/Cartmann origins acknowledged
Or show an 80’s rock star montage. “Bigger than all of them… the 80s $160 BILLION supergroup… The Keating Five! Together again… except for Cranston who’s dead, but then by law of averages most of 'em should be so they’re really way ahead of the mark. They sold out a country in 1989 and they’ll sell out arenas in 2008 with their new reunion single America- I Wanna Sex You Up and Sell You to the Chinese!. I’m Obama and I approved this message bitches.”
If it becomes clear McCain’s going to win anyway, Obama should just have fun with it. Raise the bar forever on negative ads.
“He says he was tortured in North Vietnam, but was he? You know how they get when they’re that age. It probably means he had a rude waitress at Ling’s Buffet”.
Or even go elitist trashy:
“Penelope waited 20 years for Odysseus to come home. When he did, it was a reunion that was epic. If McCain was Odysseus he’d have come home from war and said “Fuck that crippled bitch, I’m gonna go fuck this rich bitch!” and he did. Just sayin’.”
or
“John McCain… he’s an old adulterous sellout who married for money and his wife’s an ugly rich bitch who won’t acknowledge her half-sister. Point… well, just what I said. I’m Barack Obama and I say fuck 'em both.”
Is the old fart just counting on Obama being too admirable to bring up his own political scandals, I wonder?
The McCain camp has surprised me with just how vicious and lowball it’s been. They’ve been even worse than Bush. I doubt that McCain himself really has much to do with it, but his surrogates and ad people have been insane.
I agree with Dio the campaign has been quite vicious lately, but I doubt McCain even sees these before they air. If he didn’t like the preacher saying Barack HUSSEIN Obama over and over and over back in the primaries, he probably wouldn’t like his own ads now. Which I highly doubt he sees.
Good to see the dems punching back though, FINALLY a candidate with balls.
One thing that’s necessary in a President is the ability to remain in control over people with delegated authority. As Harry S Truman said, “The buck stops here.”
If Senator McCain has no control over what his ad people say on his behalf during the campaign, how is going to be capable of governing the United States? That doesn’t mean he has to vet every word in the ads, but that he has to let them know what direction to take, and he has to step in when they go in the wrong direction. It’s called “leadership”.
Why surprised? The Republican attack machine has been in force for a good couple of decades, why would they suddenly change now? I’m certainly sad to see it happen to McCain, but in no way shape or form is it a surprise to me.
And, as an aside, the BEST reason for Obama not to pick Clinton is to piss of the right. They had her pegged as their boogeywoman four years ago, and all their smears have to be thought of on the fly.
I agree. It looks like they’re just shoving him aside and doing whatever they want. When he his campaign people are saying his statements aren’t “official” and declaring that McCain’s own stated policy inclinations are “out of the question,” you really have to wonder who’s in charge.
You know what happens next, right? The Pubbies start whining about how Obama is so negative for no reason. Just like your typical bully - tough until someone punches back, and then they break into tears and to running off to mommy.
Someone should SwiftBoat McCain. He could include the real stuff, like the Keating Five and his trashing of his marriage vows, and also the rumors, like selling out the the North Vietnamese. Maybe this would stop if the Pubbies found out what mud felt like.
I agree with that, but I was naive enough to think McCain really meant it when he said he wouldn’t run a negative campaign and I was encouraged when he did things like disavow that radio guy who kept calling Obama “Hussein” at a McCain rally.
If I recall correctly, the McCain campain then went through an overhaul, and a bunch of Bush/Rove people took over, and now we’re getting “arugula” soundbites and nasty insinuations about “shady land deals.”
I actually saw some McCain surrogate a few days ago saying that the “housegate” flap represented an “attack on Cindy McCain” by the Obama campaign, therefore the gloves were off and everything was on the table, including bullshit like Ayres and Wright.
They’ve been frothing at the mouth to go gutterball with “associations” memes, but McCain has reportedly been resistant to that. I think he’s losing control of it, though. They’re doing whatever they want and, so far, McCain has either lacked the ability or the desire to reign them in.
I think McCain is scary/evil, but I think a lot of politicians don’t know much about economics as a field or in any formal way. Using that one quote for most of the ad seems silly. The part about him and Bush–that’s more effective to me.
It would be cool, but would backfire horribly. One of the defenses of the Swiftboaters was that they had no link to Bush, and a lot of effort was spent proving the connection whether one existed or not. Someone does that to McCain, and the Republicans will pin it on Obama faster than you can say 527.
If this were a movie, Chuck Hagel would have a come-to-jesus meeting with McCain at the eleventh hour, make him see just what’s going on with the campaign that he swore would be aboveboard and honorable, and make him have an attack of conscience that would force McCain to reject the nomination a week and a half from now.
That may be so, gigi, but some politicians know more than others*, and I think it’s pretty darned important that they at least have enough of a grasp of economic principles to see that Phil Gramm is NOT the best choice of main economic adviser!
*link is to a NY Times article which may require free registration.
Of course it would have to be done by someone with no link to Obama, and he’d have to say how wrong the book is in the strongest terms. The problem seems to be that the inhabitants of the cesspool are all on the right.