I wasn’t talking about any specific ad. I haven’t seen any of the McCain ads, since I don’t watch ads on TV. I record everything I want to watch on my DVR and skip the ads. I was making a general point.
I’m going to disagree with the majority of people here and say that yes, I think this going negative stuff is working.
I bring numbers for your perusal. Quinnipiac polls in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania that were released today show that the race could be tightening, when if anything Obama should be getting some kind of bounce from his foreign trip.
A PPP poll of Michigan released yesterday shows that Obama’s lead went from 9 in June to 3.
As to why, I suggest that the point of McCain’s going negative is to give his base something to hate. Republicans seem to thrive on that. From the PPP site:
It really is amazing. Obama’s the one with less experience, but McCain simply can’t be bothered to tell voters why to vote for him. And it’s working. This is looking like 2004 all over again.
Sigh . . .
Sure, as soon as he figures out how to do so in a way that will offend neither the voters who want to repair the damage done by the Bush Administration or the voters who still think Dubya is the greatest thing since no-bid contracts.
I don’t watch ads on TV either, since I’m hard-pressed to remember the last time I watched TV at all. But there’s these things called the Intertubes or something. (Rumor has it that we couldn’t be having this discussion without 'em. :)) You can see ads on them.
I have a mental image of the Spirits of McCain Past (when he was actually something of a maverick, willing to forthrightly challenge the cancers on the GOP), McCain Present (making an ass of himself with this circus show), and McCain Yet To Come (doing commercials for skin care products).
I’m picturing Zonker Harris doing the skin cancer PSAs in the late 80s in Doonesbury…
I think that it is not so much the strategy, I think their only hope is to make Obama look bad, but the execution. These ads - celvity, oil prices, visiting the troops - are all so incredibly poor and misquided that they are simply not working and if anything they will probably work against McCain.
One of the talking heads on MSNBC was saying that McCain was targeting his campaign to the same group that Hillary was…the uneducated, working class whites, who simply aren’t ‘bright’, enough to be bothered to look past the ads and will just accept what they say because it’s what they want to believe about Obama.
The other people on the panel were like, “No, no the American people are smarter than that…” He told them they were fooling themselves, that it will work within that subset of voters.
I guess the question is, how many of them are there?
As long as Obama keeps his underwear on in public, he should be okay.
If they don’t work this time, it will be the first. He can narrow the gap by going negative, he can even take the lead. But the debates are going to be THE defining moments of the campaign, as they were in 1980. When people see them side by side and Obama can give reassurance to those that think he isn’t up to the job, then Obama wins in a walk. Plus, there is the not insignificant chance that McCain erupts during a debate or comes off like that poor sap that ran with Perot.
What study, precisely? Funded by whom?
Of course “his” hands are “clean”… other people are doing his dirty-work for him.
I think you’re right, considering Obama’s rebuttal ad, with the single-word and mere phrases said by God knows who since they scroll through too quickly to see who they’re atributed to, comes off little better than responding “Nuh Uh!”, “I know you are but what am I?”, “I’m rubber, you’re glue…” and “So’s your mom.”
Seriously, we’re supposed to be swayed that McCain is wrong with someone declaring his statements as “not true” and “baloney”? Wow.
It’s quoted a few paragraphs down in the article. And was quoted in the OP.
Like it or not, the majority of Americans are as stupid as a bag of hammers.
I’m serious.
Draw your ‘bell curve’ almost any way you like, smart people are a tiny minority, and ‘average’ people, along with their below-average counterparts are the majority.
Don’t get me wrong, a lot of ‘average’ people COULD be a LOT brighter, if they went back to school and exercised their minds a bit… but they mostly vegetate in front of the idiot box instead, watching Fox news between their ‘prime time’ shows, becoming measurably more slack-jawed and drooly by the hour. Instead of the lean-mean-thinking-machines they could be, they become the intellectually lazy mouth breathers they are, letting ‘authority’ figures spoon feed them whatever ‘truth’ they like to hear. They feel ‘entitled’ to have someone do the hard thinking for them, just as they feel ‘entitled’ to grab a Mexican by the Home Depot to do the heavy lifting.
If you spend $30,000,000 on an ad campaign for personal cranial intrusion kits, ‘average’ people will buy and use them, and the sad fact of the matter is, it won’t much impact their ‘intelligence’ if they do use them.
Politicians ‘go negative’ because it works.
Another reason we don’t need him for this important job.
Ah the “Wisconsin Advertising Project”…missed it.
Hmm let’s see…I think I get it. Because McCain’s campaign is supposedly more negative at this point in time than Osama’s Mr. McCain’s campaign tactics should be brought into question? Is that the gist of it?
Give me a break… :rolleyes:
Osama’s??? Tsk. Tsk…
Never mind. This isn’t the forum to post what I posted about MM…