Friday, August 01, 2008

Desperate Times, Desperate Measures.



Rick Davis attempts to defend the recent attack ads that the McCain campaign has launched, especially the charge that Obama is a "celebrity". As far as I am aware there are no tabloid style magazines which actually feature Obama on their covers, but plenty of newspapers and political journals which do. And the charge of celebrity is especially weak when one considers that John McCain has been playing on his celebrity ever since his plane was shot down. There is hardly an ad run by his campaign that does not remind us of his status as a POW.

And while Davis is right that the Germans who cheered Obama do not have a vote, the main point is that the Germans who turned out to cheer him are cheering the fact that here is a man who will reverse the course which George W Bush has set. A course which, as we all know, McCain is campaigning to continue.

I seriously don't think the other implicit charge, that Obama is an elitist, has any chance of sticking when made by John McCain, a man who has married a multi-millionaire and has nine homes.

What's interesting here is that the media are reacting, and not in a way which suits McCain or Davis:



It does, indeed, smack of desperation. And I am pleased to note that so many in the media are calling it what it is.

UPDATE:

This quote is interesting as this appears to confirm the very thing that Davis denies in this interview:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know,
according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend,
is that
they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props.
So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.
So, rather than standing up for the troops, it is McCain who is ruthlessly using them for political gain. I wonder if this will become important now that Davis has publicly denied something which might turn out to be provable.

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