Obama to preempt McCain assault.

We have all heard by now that McCain is intending to turn negative for the last month of the campaign, but Obama is beginning to preempt the expected assault by portraying McCain as “erratic in a crisis”.

I like the notion of floating just how desperate McCain's attacks are before he makes them, and playing up the fact that McCain will do or say anything in his attempt to win.

If his negative attack ads can be properly framed before he makes them, then the public will see them as what they actually are. A desperate attempt by a desperate man to force the election away from the issues as his position on almost all of the issues is box office poison to most electors.

Obama officials call it political jujitsu – turning the attacks back on the attacker.

Obama plans to launch a series of ads placing McCain's forthcoming attacks into context.

His campaign is going up Monday on national cable stations with a scathing ad saying: “Three quarters of a million jobs lost this year. Our financial system in turmoil. And John McCain? Erratic in a crisis. Out of touch on the economy. No wonder his campaign wants to change the subject.

“Turn the page on the financial crisis by launching dishonorable, dishonest ‘assaults’ against Barack Obama. Struggling families can't turn the page on this economy, and we can't afford another president who is this out of touch.”

The very fact that John McCain, at a time when the US economy is in turmoil, wants to "turn the page" on this subject says everything that needs to be said about his desire to always put country first. He doesn't. As always he wants to put the election of himself first. I'm not saying that he shouldn't, but it does emphasise what a lie his entire campaign slogan is.

And the Obama campaign are clever to point out just what these attack ads are for.

“We think the McCain campaign made a huge error by telling the press that their strategy was to distract from the most important issue facing voters,” a senior Obama official said. “Every attack going forward will be easy to characterize for what it is – an attempt to distract from the Bush-McCain economic record."

McCain has run his campaign by assuming that the American public are stupid, Obama is running on the opposite assumption. Obama presumes that the American people are clever enough to see the game which McCain is playing and he is banking on the fact that they will see McCain's desperation and dismiss his ads on that basis.

And, to be honest, I do think it is unbelievably desperate to find yourself, in October, talking about Tony Rezko and William Ayers. That shit didn't stick the first time it was thrown and it's unlikely to stick now.

McCain wants to avoid the central theme of the campaign, the economy, because he has been so consistently wrong on the subject.

And he now finds himself going negative because his campaign has lacked a coherent theme which anyone could identify.

The very fact that a 72 year old man is now campaigning for change whilst running on the ticket of the party which has been in power for the last eight years is simply farcical. The Republicans deserve to be laughed out of office.

UPDATE:

Here's the ad:



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Tags: McCain, Obama, US election 2008, negative ads