This is the week the new-style campaign turns old.<\/p>\n
Early Monday morning the Obama campaign released a TV spot slamming John McCain for his involvement in the Keating Five scandal.\u00a0 The attack itself is a scandal.\u00a0 McCain was totally exonerated by the special counsel appointed for the case. But that hasn\u2019t stopped Obama, who, of course, approved this message.<\/p>\n
The ad appears to be part of a carefully planned drive to go negative on McCain without taking the wrap for going negative.\u00a0 Conventional wisdom holds that this year voters will punish the candidate who first attacks the other\u2019s character.<\/p>\n
So in four days of artful preparation and with happy help from the mainstream media, the Obama camp has positioned their smears as responses — well, not exactly responses, as Sarah Palin\u2019s criticisms of Obama\u2019s judgment for his relationship with Weather Underground founder and unrepentant radical activist Bill Ayers came after the Obama camp had hit McCain for showing \u201cerratic\u201d behavior in his role in the financial crisis.<\/p>\n
But the MSM still bought the Obama he-hit-me-first line.\u00a0 From yesterday\u2019s New York Times to this morning\u2019s posts on Mark Halperin\u2019s The Page blog and Politico.com, the Obama ad is being reported as \u201cpreemptive\u201d, going after McCain\u2019s character because McCain had planned to go after Obama\u2019s.\u00a0 As Politco says, in addition to the Palin speeches about Obama and Ayers, the McCain campaign \u201cintends\u201d to air ads linking Obama to both Ayers and \u201cmoney launderer Tony Rezko.\u201d Rezko is the man who helped Obama pay for his Hyde Park neighborhood house.\u00a0 So, you see, all Obama is doing is prudently getting there first.<\/p>\n
Yet also according to Politico, the Obama organization is moving on numerous fronts, not just in this morning\u2019s TV ad.\u00a0 There is a 13-minute video, a new dedicated website where the video is posted and surrogates deployed to all the media outlets.\u00a0 In other words, this is a full frontal assault across the field of engagement.\u00a0 It almost certainly wasn\u2019t cooked up only after Sarah Palin\u2019s speeches late last week but in development much longer.\u00a0 The cries of we\u2019re just responding are merely measure to minimize collateral damage.<\/p>\n
And yet there is a tone in the Obama campaign\u2019s counter-attack on Palin that suggests they believe their man is highly vulnerable on the matter of Mr. Ayers.\u00a0 We all know about their attempts to suppress documents regarding the relationship.\u00a0 But since the Palin speeches \u2013 and for the first time in weeks — they have played the race card.\u00a0 Palin\u2019s attacks were \u201cracially tinged,\u201d they\u2019ve charged.\u00a0 It is hard to see how the Alaska governor\u2019s actual words support this view \u2013 but racism the biggest bomb in their accusation arsenal, so it looks as if they\u2019ll use it whenever the McCain campaign gets too close to the Obama-Ayers connection.\u00a0 It is a good rule of thumb in politics: If someone over-responds when you hit him, hit him in the same place again.\u00a0 He is hurt, even if he\u2019s trying not to show it.<\/p>\n
At the same time, McCain must do more.\u00a0 He is down in the polls, but not because of Obama\u2019s personal attacks, which have only just begun.\u00a0 With the exception of the Palin-Biden debate, the last few weeks have been all financial meltdown all the time in the media.\u00a0 The Democrats have been unrelenting in portraying the crisis as a product of decades of GOP deregulation.\u00a0\u00a0 This is the opposite of the truth, of course.<\/p>\n
The McCain campaign has left these charges largely unanswered.\u00a0 It has not said that the ones who are responsible for them, including Senator Obama, were also responsible for blocking Bush Administration and McCain attempts to reform (that is, to regulate) Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. It is widely believed that, had those reforms passed, there would have been no crisis.<\/p>\n
Yes, Fox News, the Wall Street Journal editorial page and major bloggers have detailed the facts. And in an amazing display of crossing from the dark to the lights side, Saturday Night Live did a dead on skit to that effect, too, this past weekend.\u00a0 But in driving a message home and giving it political salience, it matters what the candidates say, and Senator McCain and his organization have made little attempt to rebut and counter the Democrat\u2019s attack. McCain needs to use Tuesday\u2019s debates and follow up after to drive in this message.<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s gloves off time in the 2008 campaign.\u00a0 The polls have swung around wildly over the since mid-August.\u00a0 It\u2019s a fair bet they\u2019ll swing around a lot more before Election Day.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
This is the week the new-style campaign turns old. Early Monday morning the Obama campaign released a TV spot slamming John McCain for his involvement in the Keating Five scandal.\u00a0 The attack itself is a scandal.\u00a0 McCain was totally exonerated by the special counsel appointed for the case. But that hasn\u2019t stopped Obama, who, of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-51","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-campaign-2008","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=51"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":624,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/51\/revisions\/624"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=51"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=51"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=51"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}