In the doldrums of August, with John McCain dominating the current news cycle while Barack Obama wraps up his vacation in Hawaii, both campaigns have been stepping up their attack ads.
McCain’s most recent dumps the Paris Hilton references, but keeps alive his campaign’s “mere celebrity” rap on Obama in his new “Taxman” ad:
Obama’s ad, “Fix the Economy,” uses McCain’s own words against him, pairing his recent sunny assessments of the economy with fear- and despair-filled words of voters:
On an unrelated note, both candidates will stage their first joint appearance of the campaign on Saturday when they travel to California for an appearance at the Rev. Rick Warren’s Saddleback megachurch. Matthew 25, a pro-Obama Christian group that hopes to enlist religious voters for the Democratic candidate, will air an ad called “Families” during the televised confab:
None too pleased about John McCain’s “Celeb” ad that has largely defined the campaign this week, the Democratic National Committee has fired back with this ad:
Figuring their first shot at least drew blood, McCain’s ad shop came back with more mockery of Obama, in an ad called “The One” (the snark nickname McCain staffers have long used for Obama).
Team Obama promptly let it be known it was shocked, shocked: “It’s downright sad that on a day when we learned that 51,000 Americans lost their jobs, a candidate for the presidency is spending all of his time and the powerful platform he has on these sorts of juvenile antics,” said spokesman Hari Sevugan.
In the wake of Barack Obama’s largely successful world tour, a new meme has wafted into the campaign, pushed hard by John McCain’s people and validated by some members of the media who have clearly had it up to here with what they see as the Obama campaign’s arrogant insularity.
In full mocking mode, McCain campaign manager Rick Davis got the ball rolling Tuesday with this crack: “Barack Obama has more fans across the world than Paris Hilton does.”
Team McCain followed up Wednesday that features not only Hilton but Britney Spears and Obama’s mega-speech in Berlin. “He’s the biggest celebrity in the world,” says the announcer of Obama. “But is he ready to lead?”
The ad’s running in 11 battleground states, among them Wisconsin and Iowa.
If that’s not unsubtle enough, McCain campaign honcho followed up on a conference call:”Do the American people want to elect the world’s biggest celebrity or do they want to elect an American hero?” And Davis followed up with an e-mail:
Only a celebrity of Barack Obama’s magnitude could attract 200,000 fans in Berlin who gathered for the mere opportunity to be in his presence. These are not supporters or even voters, but fans fawning over The One. Only celebrities like Barack Obama go to the gym three times a day, demand “MET-RX chocolate roasted-peanut protein bars and bottles of a hard-to-find organic brew — Black Forest Berry Honest Tea” and worry about the price of arugula.
Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor tried to laugh it off shortly after the ad was released:
On a day when major news organizations across the country are taking
Senator McCain to task for a steady stream of false, negative attacks,
his campaign has launched yet another. Or, as some might say, ‘Oops! He
did it again.’
When reporters caught up with Obama at a campaign stop in Missouri, he essentially blew off the ad: “You know, I don’t pay attention to John McCain’s ads, although I do notice he doesn’t seem to have anything to say very positive about himself. He seems to only be talking about me… You need to ask John McCain what he’s for and not just what he’s against.”
The GOP got even more exercised by a report in the Washington Post that fed perfectly into the Obama-is-elitist frame. The lede: “Barack Obama has long been his party’s presumptive nominee. Now he’s becoming its presumptuous nominee.”
It went on to describe his meeting with Capitol Hill Dems in which he purportedly said, “This is the moment . . . that the world is waiting for,” adding: “I have become a symbol of the possibility of America returning to our best traditions.”
One problem, though. Democrats attending the closed-door meeting said that wildly mangled the real quote: “It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign — that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It’s about America. I have just become a symbol.”
Democrats didn’t have much luck with the pushback, snarking about McCain’s multimillion-dollar lifestyle, pointing out at one point that he routinely wears $520 black leather Ferragamo shoes on the campaign trail.
Update: The Obama hit back with an ad of their own, called “Low Road:”
The folks at JibJab, who made a considerable satiric online splash during the 2004 presidential race, have just posted their first take on this year’s campaign. It features the candidates and a cast of hundreds singing a rewrite of “The Times They Are a-Changin’.” It’s worth a look.
When Barack Obama launched his first advertisement of the general election campaign this week, it was notable where his strategists decided to air it — and more to the point in this supposedly purple state, where they opted not to.
The Democratic Party’s likely presidential nominee is running the ad in a dozen battleground states, but also in six that lean heavily Republican: Montana, North Dakota, Indiana, North Carolina, Georgia and Alaska. Conspicuously missing from the list of battlegrounds are such presumed battlegrounds of Minnesota, Washington and Oregon.
And it’s notable that Minnesota was on the list of states where John McCain targeted his first ad last week. All of which raises a couple of (at this point unanswerable) questions: Does the Obama team assume Minnesota’s in the bag? Does McCain’s really, truly think the state is going to be competitive in November?
In any case, here’s the ad, a soft and fuzzy paen to America, American values and Obama’s American roots.
Determined not to be Swift-boated as John Kerry was four years ago, Barack Obama’s campaign unveiled a new website today that bluntly takes on unsubstantiated rumors and innuendo that have dogged the candidate for months. Among them: He’s a secret Muslim, he won’t recite the Pledge of Allegiance, his wife used the word “whitey.”
Obama is bucking the conventional wisdom of politics, the widely-held belief that the best (maybe the only) way to deal with rumors is to ignore them. So the campaign launched a new web page called “Fight The Smears” that airs out the rumors and then rebuts them point by point.
Campaign spokesman Tommy Vietor threw down the gauntlet thusly:
“The Obama campaign isn’t going to let dishonest smears spread across the internet unanswered. Whenever challenged with these lies we will aggressively push back with the truth and help our supporters debunk the false rumors floating around the internet. This website is an action center that allows supporters to upload their address books and send
emails to all of their friends. It’s not enough to just know the truth, we have to be proactive and fight back.”
Now that Barack Obama has won the Democratic nomination, a persistent meme of the presidential campaign has resurfaced, equating his candidacy with that of Ronald Reagan, the last truly insurgent candidate to win his party’s nomination.
Much has been made of their stylistic similarities, their cool, camera-ready styles, how each decisively broke with their party’s reigning orthodoxy. The first wave of Obama-Reagan comparisons surfaced last January, after Obama explicitly linked himself to the Gipper:
“I don’t want to present myself as some sort of singular figure. I think part of what’s different are the times…I think Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that Richard Nixon did not and in a way that Bill Clinton did not. He put us on a fundamentally different path because the country was ready for it. I think they felt like with all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s and government had grown and grown but there wasn’t much sense of accountability in terms of how it was operating. I think people, he just tapped into what people were already feeling, which was we want clarity we want optimism, we want a return to that sense of dynamism and entrepreneurship that had been missing.”
Obama’s Democratic opponents promptly went nuts, accusing him of treason, cozying up to the Dark Lord of the GOP, etc., etc., but several pundits picked up his observation and ran with it, saying it was a pretty good analysis of how two utterly different candidacies had seemed to tap into the Zeitgeist.
Now, in the wake of Obama’s victory over Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Obama-Reagan comparisons are firing up again.
Old Reagan (and Nixon) hand Pat Buchanan established the link this week:
Democrats may talk of making the economy the issue this fall, but Republicans are going to make Barack the issue. Story line: We cannot entrust our beloved America, in a time of war, to this radical and exotic figure who has so many crazy and extremist associates.
Barack’s problem is thus Reagan’s problem.
As the country wished to be rid of Jimmy Carter in 1980, so the nation today wishes to be rid of Bush and his Republicans. But America is apprehensive over a roll of the dice, in Bill Clinton’s metaphor.
How did Reagan ease the anxiety? In the debate with Carter, he came off as conservative, yes, but also traditional, mainstream, witty and the more likable man. The real Reagan came through.
With his persona, Barack may be able to do the same.
Barack Obama’s current political circumstance is eerily similar to that of Ronald Reagan in his 1980 campaign for president. Both Obama and Reagan, from the beginning of their insurgent campaigns, were viewed as transformative political figures. Both enjoyed passionate grassroots support.
Both men had defeated centrist establishment candidates for their party’s nomination. Reagan defeated George H.W. Bush, who was viewed by the growing conservative base of the Republican Party as too moderate. Obama beat Hilary Clinton whose husband had been elected twice by moving away from his party’s traditional progressive roots and running as a centrist, a path Clinton herself followed (at least at the beginning of her campaign).
In 1980 most conventional political observers failed to recognize the growing grassroots power of the rock solid conservative activists who propelled Reagan to his party’s nomination. In the 2008 presidential campaign supporters of Hillary Clinton failed to recognize the growing assertiveness of the Democrats progressive base.
On the tail end of his victory lap last week, Barack Obama ended up back home in Chicago. He walked into his headquarters Friday to thank his troops for the historic upset they had just pulled off.
With a video camera rolling, he praised them, told them to get some rest and, in effect, told them that the hard work between now and Nov. 4 is just beginning. It’s a far more intimate look at the guy than can be gleaned from his mega-rallies, unscripted and up close (and just because it was undoubtedly sanctioned by the campaign, it doesn’t make it less interesting).
Gov. Tim Pawlenty showed more leg than he ever has before Sunday on the persistent speculation that he’s near (or even at) the top of John McCain’s short list for vice-presidential running mates.
He appeared on “Fox News Sunday” with Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, with host Chris Wallace describing them as “the governors of two swing states who are both contenders in the “veepstakes.”
Asked directly about the vice presidency, Pawlenty opened the door a tiny crack after saying for months only that he’s concentrating on his day job at the state capitol:
I have a fond and deep respect for Senator McCain and his leadership. I want to help him become the president because I think he’d be a great president. But I don’t have any designs on being vice president.
If somebody came to me and said that, of course, it would be an honor to be mentioned, honor to be asked. It would be difficult to turn that down. But I don’t have any designs, and it’s not why I’m such a great and strong promoter of Senator McCain.
That said, Pawlenty spent most of the program assuming the role a vice-presidential candidate usually does, beating up on the opposition while leaving the high road to the top of the ticket.
Some excerpts:
PAWLENTY: Well, I was just going to say on that issue of the perception or the message that Senator Obama is going to have everybody working together, that defies the facts in the record.
He is somebody who’s been out of the mainstream not just of America but of his party. He’s somebody who has taken positions that have regularly ranked lockstep, almost robotically, with the Democratic caucus and liberal interest groups.
You look at Senator McCain’s voting record — he has consistently and regularly reached across the aisle to get things done in a big way. The change really has been from Senator McCain, somebody who’s willing to take risks, take on big issues and get things done for the country
I think once [McCain’s] message resonates or gets out with people as compared to Senator Obama’s — Senator McCain wants to cut taxes. He does not want to raise taxes on Social Security like Senator Obama does.
Senator McCain wants to relieve tax burdens on businesses so the entrepreneurial spirit can be unleashed and people will invest and grow jobs, as opposed to adding tax burdens to businesses in this country like Senator Obama wants to do.
But judgment is a derivative of a number of things, including experience and wisdom. Senator McCain has got actual national security and military experience.
And this isn’t limited to a slip on Jerusalem in the case of Senator Obama. First he was going to meet with tyrants without precondition. Now he’s modified that.
He was in favor of lifting the embargo against Cuba. Now he’s modified his comments on that.
He first said the Iranian revolution guard wasn’t a terrorist organization. Now he says maybe it is.
Wonder if he passed the audition? (If, indeed it was that. As Wallace said when he introduced the two governors, “as I welcome you both back, consider this something of an “American Idol” audition, because I’m sure they’re watching back at campaign headquarters.”
The Republican National Committee wasted no time taking on Barack Obama. The Xcel Energy Center had barely emptied out Tuesday night when the party had dumped a huge load of anti-Obama stuff on its website. Exhibit A is a web-only video featuring his erstwhile Democratic presidential competitors (and former President Bill Clinton) saying nasty, dismissive things about him. Take a look.
This almost certainly won’t be the last time stuff like this is disgorged, given the fact that Obama emerged from the longest primary fight in modern history, meaning there’s a LOT more video out there.
Much has been made of their stylistic similarities, their cool, camera-ready
styles, how each decisively broke with their party’s reigning orthodoxy. The first wave of Obama-Reagan comparisons surfaced last January, after Obama explicitly linked himself to the Gipper: