"Never" Ad

I actually think that this ad is slightly too complicated for it's own good. I get it, but I do wonder if it's not made for people who would already be Obama supporters. Do the vast majority of Americans know or care about who Abramoff and Reed are? I like the "more of the same" riff and think that's worth hitting hard.

But the Obama camp should be hitting McCain harder on the economy; this rich man wants tax cuts for the rich at a time when the US can't afford them. Show how out of touch with most people McCain is.

Or simply highlight his numerous flip-flops and show how he will literally say anything to get elected and continue Bush's disastrous policies.

As Frank Rich points out in the New York Times, one of the reasons Barack Obama is not leading by twenty points is that we don't really know who John McCain is:

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

[...]Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and her husband, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

[...]Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

McCain's entire campaign is built on several outright lies and the candidate himself makes so many rookie mistakes that he ought to be a national laughing stock. It's not negative campaigning to point out just who exactly John McCain is.