Category Archives: Politics: McCain

I dunno. I suspect it's not the single most demeaning ad ever put out by a major party presidential campaign, and I'm prepared to believe it's not the most stupid (although I wonder), but is this new McCain (web only) ad Fan Club the most simultaneously demeaning and stupid ad ever put out by a major party Presidential candidate?

Could be.

TPM says Having found most pundits to be incorrigible morons on racial/sexual messaging, McCain decides to push a bit further … (the key point, supposedly, is Hot [white] chicks dig Obama but to my untrained eye, this one is just simply moronic and an insult to the Republic).

I think “Anonymous Liberal” at Crooks & Liars got it just right when he wrote what he'd have Obama say in response to all this rot,

My opponent has taken to calling me a “celebrity” in all of his commercials. The suggestion, I can only assume, is that all of you (gesturing to the crowd) show up at events like this and donate your time and your money to this campaign because you’re all adoring groupies who are obsessed with me. Now, that would certainly be flattering if it were true, but I’m not going to delude myself. The reality is I can’t act, I can’t sing, and my personal life is incredibly boring.

The truth is that no one would be paying any attention to me at all if I wasn’t talking about things that really matter to a lot of people. You’re not here tonight–and you’re not watching at home–because you want to be entertained. Lord knows there are plenty of things that you could be doing with your time right now that would be far more entertaining than listening to me. No, you’re here tonight because you love your country and you’re concerned about the direction it’s been heading over the last eight years.

You’re not here tonight to see what kind of outfit I’m wearing or to hear my latest hit single–and if you are, I think you’re probably going to be disappointed. No, you’re here because you want change, you want a government that fights for people like you and not on behalf of powerful special interests; you want a government that keeps you safe by pursuing a rationale foreign policy abroad and keeps your family secure by creating jobs, ensuring access to affordable health care, and fighting for energy independence.

That’s why you’re here. That’s why you’re volunteering your time at record levels. That’s why you’re contributing your hard-earned money in record amounts.

So remember, when John McCain and his surrogates call me a “celebrity,” they’re not insulting me; they’re insulting you. They’re insinuating that you are a mindless groupie rather than a concerned citizen, a fan rather than a voter.

But it’s not going to work. You know why you’re here, you know why you’re watching, and you’re much smarter than they give you credit for.

Perfect.

Update (6pm): As Larry notes, they took down that copy of the video. So try this one. Or if that fails, search for “Fan Club” site:youtube.com at Google

[Note: If you are reading this via the news feed, you may wish to click through to see the videos. There are some good ones this week.]

The week started with McCain successfully putting the race card “issue” (subtext: Obama is black!) on the front pages, so that was good for him. On the other hand, the idea that McCain is old and grumpy got more traction too. We then found out the answer to last week's question whether McCain could go any lower and dirtier — Yes, he can! — as we moved to a McCain ad suggesting Obama is the anti-Christ (yes, really). And that was only the weekend.

Then McCain was up — his weird commercials had taken the focus off issues that matter like jobs and the war.

Then facts — and Paris Hilton — bit back.

• From the Democratic Party via YouTube:

• Talking Points Memo, Gramps/Grumps
• Bob Herbert, Running While Black
• Joe Klein, The Scum Also Rises (guess who the “scum” refers to …)
• Carpetbagger, McCain doesn’t think his campaign is ‘negative in the slightest’
• New York Magazine, The Low-Road Warrior
  Mudslinging will damage McCain’s brand—but it may be the only way he can win.
• Obama released an anti-McCain ad, Low Road Express
  
  Probably not Obama's best ever, but makes the point.

• The McCain campaign released another anti-Obama commercial, but to most viewers this one will seem like the political equivalent of scoring against yourself. Has to be seen to be believed.

  But there may be a (very evil) method to the madness: SoonerG at Kos suggests that the point of the latest McCain ads is to depict Obama as the anti-Christ. Don't laugh. The first thing I thought of when I saw the ad was that it was a dog-whistle call-out to evangelicals who would be offended by Obama's suggestion that “a light will shine down upon you” and inspire people to vote for him.

  The reason this is evil — really evil — is that the logical and devout thing for true believers to do is to assassinate the anti-Christ. McCain is playing with nuclear weapons here.

• Wonk Room, McCain Embraces Newt's Big Oil Lie, Chants 'Drill More, Drill Now, Pay Less'
• Late night comics have their way with McCain:
  
• Crooks & Liars, McCain Lies About His Support For MLK Jr. Day in Arizona. FWIW, I think this is the sort of lie that is a window into the soul. There's no way a person could forget this, or not be fully informed; there's no excuse other then either (1) dangerous self-deception; or (2) a complete willingness to lie to the public.
• msblucow, The “attack” ad I'd run against McCain If It Were Up To Me
• TPM, It's Hard, is worth quoting in full:
  

  I'm amused to hear the McCain camp's deep sense of “grievance” over any suggestion that McCain is running a xenophobic and often race-tinged campaign against Barack Obama. It's amazing how you can be pushing a message that your opponent is in league with foreign terrorists and comparing him to twenty-something white women best known for their 'behind the music' episodes and so many people can get the wrong idea.

• Kos, McCain website scrubbed of 'celebrity' citation
• Gergen: McCain Using Code Words To Attack Obama As “Uppity”
• JoeTrippi, McCain – Race? Not me!
• Prominent S.Florida blogger Bark Bark Woof Woof asks how John McCain's Cuba Connection will play down here.
• Joe Conason, Salon, Wanting the White House in the worst way: The pundits who adore John McCain wonder why he has adopted campaign tactics he once despised, but his compromise with the smear merchants began a long time ago.
• Crooks & Liars, Scrub a dub dub: JohnMcCain.com removes McCain calling himself “The One” from website
• Carpetbagger, McCain on Social Security — four contradictory positions (and counting)
• Carpetbagger, ‘A surprisingly immature politician’;
• Obama Campaign, Original:

• TPM, Multiple Oil Company Executives Gave Huge Contributions To Electing McCain Just Days After Offshore Drilling Reversal
• Rick Perlstein, FNB Politics: Charles Bronson Edition
McCainsLobbyists.com provides A cute online graphical guide to McCain's lobbyist connections.
• John Soltz, Senator McCain, Troops and Security Are No Joke
• Noted feminist John McCain, volunteers wife for topless (ESPN says also “occasionally bottomless”) beauty contest. (via TPM). Carpetbagger deduces that the tasteless remark was <a href=”part of McCain's prepared text — not some off-the-cuff idiocy. TPM follows up with links to video of the contest, and a video of McCain's proffer of his spouse, aptly titled, Take My Wife, Please!
• Carpetbagger, ‘The oil companies have placed their bet on Senator McCain’
• Greg Palast, The McCain [Energy] Plan: Homer Simpson without the Donut
• What does it mean when Paris Hilton (responding to McCain's ad mentioning her), turns out to have a better energy policy than McCain does?

• Carpetbagger has the same reaction I did: Why is Paris Hilton better able to talk substance than John McCain?
• At Political Animal, Kevin Drum is reduced to accusing McCain of Buffoonery
• Political Animal says the state-by-state numbers <a href=”Strongly favor Obama
• Carpetbagger, Chutzpah Watch: McCain calls on lawmakers to spend more time on the job in Congress
• Brave New Films does it again, with this super video, McCain Women's Clinic:

• Delong, McCain's energy policy is Yet Another Reason to Shut the Republican Party Down Today…
• Susan Crawford is waiting for McCain's tech policy — promised for July. But she's not optimistic: “Sen. McCain is much more interested in offshore drilling than innovation.”
• Crooks & Liars, McCain Tire Gauge Mocking Of Obama Ignores Support From Those On His Side Of The Aisle. And, later, inevitably, McCain deflates his own “tire-gauge” attack
• Modo, McCain’s Green-Eyed Monster asserts that it's envy driving McCain: “That’s the only explanation for why a man who prides himself on honor, a man who vowed not to take the low road in the campaign, having been mugged by W. and Rove in South Carolina in 2000, is engaging in a festival of juvenilia.” [To which one can only say, “the only explanation???”]
• Washington Post, McCain Bundler Collects From Unlikely Donors — they smell a scandal, but don't come right out and say it. Incidentally, it is illegal to launder political contributions from abroad via US residents/citizens; it's also illegal to evade contribution limits by giving money to others so they in turn can donate it.
• TPM finds the next layer: High-Ranking McCain Campaign Officials Were Paid Lobbyists For Hess—and it's Hess that's the source of a bunch of dodgy-looking bundled contributions.
• Some surprisingly relevant Hess history from national treasure Morton Mintz in The Hessians, Then and Now
• Digby, Paris Drinks McCain's Milkshake: “The tenor of this race, aided by events, has changed. McCain is on the defensive.”
• Rachel Maddow on McCain’s new PR strategy: Ride Kid Rock’s coattails; basically, McCain can't draw his own crowds, so he has to go wherever there are a lot of people.
• Carpetbagger, Watching it all fall apart at once: McCain's foreign policy in tatters
• Pumped: It looks real, but it's true, so that's the giveaway that it's a fake:

• Talkleft, Obama v. McCain on Military Tribunals
• DNC, Maverick No More

• Cenk Uygur, Politico, Not the candidate he used to be. Well, if it's in the Politico, that means it is or will soon be the conventional wisdom, right?
• McCain loses straw poll in GOP bastion Duvall County, Florida: Obama wins Jacksonville Regional Chamber of Commerce Hob Nob straw poll with 57%.
• Maybe stuff like that is why McCain has to give people stuff to get them to post nice comments about him on blogs. Yes, You, too, can be a mindless, rewarded McCain campaign troll (Carpetbagger)
• Crooks & Liars, McCain Campaign Yanks “True Conservative” Ad from YouTube, Web Site. Here's the McCain ad (from the primaries) that McCain doesn't want you to see (anymore):
  
  Doesn't really fit that “maverick” image, does it?
• Indeed: Crooks & Liars, Jack Cafferty on McCain: “This maverick stuff is a lot of hooey”
• Delaware GOP Senate candidate expelled from party for supporting Obama. McCain is too old, he said. “He also has concerns about McCain's temperament and past positions on illegal immigration and the Iraq war.”

Pumped: It looks real, but it's true, so that's the giveaway that this “McCain Ad” must be a fake:

Normally I save the anti-McCain stuff for Friday, as don't want the blog to become a one-note operation. But this …

The McCain campaign just released another anti-Obama commercial, The One.

Perhaps to most viewers this one will seem like the political equivalent of scoring against yourself as much of it is about how wonderful Obama is, and the attack part involves a clumsy use of Charlton Heston. But there may be a (very evil) method to the madness: SoonerG at Daily Kos suggests that the point of the latest McCain ads is to depict Obama as the anti-Christ. Don't laugh. The first thing I thought of when I saw the ad was that it was a dog-whistle call-out to evangelicals who would be offended by Obama's suggestion that “a light will shine down upon you” and inspire people to vote for him. But it could well be that other people will see it as a more direct appeal (consider, a Google search for “obama anti-Christ” finds “about 990,000” pages).

In light of last week's attack on a Unitarian church for being too “liberal,” is it so far-fetched to worry that some unhinged true believer may hear all this and decide he has a call to assassinate the anti-Christ? It's perhaps fortunate that, as one Christian pastor put it to me via email, “the people who believe in the anti-Christ tend to believe that he/she is too powerful for one person to take out with a .30-.06.”

Nevertheless, McCain is playing with nuclear weapons here. It's despicable.

Here's what a poster at Progressive Revival had to say,

A vote for Senator Obama is a vote for the man we think will make the best President, not for a new Messiah. As Christians, we have one Lord And Savior. Jesus Christ. It is blasphemous to suggest otherwise.

And it is beyond offensive to suggest that Senator Obama is a false Messiah or the anti-Christ himself. How low can we go? It shows the McCain campaign is willing to make a mockery of our faith to feed people's fears. Christians need to reject this out of hand.

We will be calling on the McCain campaign to repudiate this ad and take it down immediately. If you would like to add your voice to this effort, please email me at mara@matthew25.org.

Finding something even lower will be a great challenge for McCain. Based on the past couple weeks, however, I'm now ready to believe they are up to it.

Although superficially this was a better week than last week's disaster, since McCain's attack ads shaped a good bit of the campaign narrative, I'd argue that in retrospect this week may turn out to be the one that the McCain campaign jumped the shark. The negative ads were so untrue and undignified that even the national press started to notice. Which means that if this continues McCain is going to have trouble with his base.

• Kos, McCain's Campaign: So Dumb, We Had to Check to Make Sure It Was Real
• NYT, McCain can't count on carrying his home state. See also Kos, John McCain's Arizona problem explaining just why local folks might be unhappy with their Senator.
• Eschaton, THEY LEFT JOHN MCCAIN ALOOOOOONE
• Fearguth’s Great Snark Hunt does a compare-and-contrast of the McCain/Obama images
• National Journal, GOP candidates facing tough races are avoiding McCain's nominating convention
• Temper, temper, McCain Blows Off WSJ Reporter (VIDEO)
• Kos, McCain's Hispanic problem
• “Women for John McCain”: McCain flunks the milk test:

• TPM Election Central | Talking Points Memo, Critic Or Cheerleader: The Definitive McCain Iraq Timeline:
  

  Our time-line casts some doubt on a key McCain campaign claim: That he's been a broad critic of Bush's war policies for many years now.

  It also finds multiple inconsistencies in his public statements on the war.

  The claim that McCain has been a critic of Bush's war policies in general is central to his candidacy. In July, he said: “I think you know that I opposed the failed strategy of the Bush administration.”

  Our timeline does support some of McCain's argument. It's true that as early as August of 2003, after he'd visited Iraq, he started saying that there weren't enough American troops in Iraq. At the time, this was consensus opinion among Democratic members of Congress and foreign policy hands. When McCain claims credit for having called for more troops early on, he's right.

  Nonetheless, from the very beginning, all the way up to the present, McCain has repeatedly voiced strong support for Bush's approach in general, in ways that are at odds with his later claims of prescience.

• Texas Cowboy, The Truth About John McCain
• Kos, McCain: We won the Iraqi civil war
• NYT, McCain Now Adopts Obama/Iraq Timetable (last week it was surrender or something)
• Reidblog, McCain is The angry American
• Carpetbagger, McCain can’t stop hitting the wrong note
• Bob Herbert says McCain is worse than you think
• Crooks & Liars, John McCain, gaffe machine?
• Yee-haw — the McCain country concert is free
• Crooks & Liars, McCain Increasingly More Unhinged In Denver Speech
• DeLong, Two People Who Do Not Speak for John McCain: Phil Gramm. John McCain; see also Carpetbagger, McCain may not speak for the McCain campaign
• Carpetgagger notes that McCain reverses course on affirmative action, crosses flip-flop threshold — 70!
• Crooks & Liars, Gay Marriage Issue Leads to Problems Counting and Adding for McCain
• HuffPo, McCain Fumbles His “This Week” Appearance
• Crooks & Liars, 2003 Flashback: McCain Mocked Germany and France
• TPM Video, McCain 'evolves' on how long we should be in Iraq.

  See also TPM Video, The Big Picture

• McCain — the honorable McCain — did a dishonest commercial. Here is only some of the reax: Carpetbagger, When the going gets tough, McCain gets disgraceful; Kos, McCain Would Rather Lose His Honor In Order To Win a Political Campaign, and Carpetbagger, When a presidential campaign gets caught lying, it should be news … and eventually the media gets shamed into covering the story … Andrea Mitchell: McCain attack ad “literally not true”
  
• Faced with reporters calling him on his dishonesty, McCain first doubles down and stonewalls. See Kos, Who's Lying? John McCain or Andrea Mitchell?. In my opinion this is a very serious error.
• And, apparently, they eventually figure out that it's an error, and back down a little: Kos, McCain camp admits ad was false. But not very much. And, as this Washington Post article, McCain Charge Against Obama Lacks Evidence shows, it's starting to wear thin. Although the headline guys still have no guts.
• And then, another day later, we learn that McCain was ready to attack Obama for having gone to visit the wounded soldiers and Marines — when Obama decided not to go, they just attacked him for that instead:
  

  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.

• Kos, McCain's phenomenal grasp of economics
• MSNBC.com, McCain has spot removed from his face (turns out it's harmless, but even so).
• Campaign for America's Future have a new video explaining Econ 101 to John McCain
• TPM, New and Improved McCain Timeline
• Carpetbagger, McCain campaign exploits Black Hawk Down hero, continues dishonest smear
• Carpetbagger (he's good!), McCain’s policy on Russia gets slightly less coherent (yes, that’s possible)
• Kos, Obama Outraising McCain … in Idaho?
• TalkLeft, McCain Was Against Raising Taxes Before He Was Maybe For It
• TPMMuckraker, McCain Adviser's Horrifying Iraq Track Record: Will the Press Notice?
• Washington Independent, Maverick McCain Turns Mean
  

  Sen. John McCain, American war hero and admired political maverick, as well as presumed Republican nominee for president, had a message for Elisabeth Bumiller, the venerated New York Times reporter, along with the rest of the media assigned to travel with him the week of July 20.

  “What do you want, you little jerks?” McCain said to Bumiller and those behind her, as the press surged forward on the “Straight Talk” Boeing 737 on July 21.

• Crooks & Liars, Didn’t McCain’s camp say they would run a “respectful campaign?” Romney knows!
• Huffpo, Afghan Ambassador Trumpets Obama Agenda
• Kos, McCain paid a year's salary since he showed up to work
• Great Snark: TPM, « McCain Refuses to Endorse Likely GOP Nominee
• Jamison Foser at Media Matters points out how the McCain campaign's attempt to subject the press corps to Pavlovian conditioning has been working pretty well.
• Carpetbagger, Did the McCain campaign give up on its lobbyist ban? (Yup.)
• The Washington Independent, McCain's Cowboy Persona deconstructed.
• NYT, Editorial – Low-Road Express. Well, he wasn't going to get their endorsement anyway…
• It gets worse: Carpetbagger, How low can McCain go?
• Werblog, McCain's Entrepreneurial “Supporters”
• Carpetbagger, McCain still doesn’t speak for the McCain campaign
• Call him “the albatross” — the question is what does McCain do with “W” at the GOP convention. Slate's John Dickerson considers The Party Crasher
• Weaver, McCain's Former Strategist, Calls “Celeb” Ad “Childish”. He's referring to this McCain ad trying to link Obama to sleazy and brainless bimbettes (oh, and taxes and dependence on foreign oil) …
• Good summary of the week by the Carpetbagger: Senator Small and It’s not the campaign, it’s the candidate.
• DeLong, Stupidest Celebrity Alive: John McCain
• Let the jokes begin:
  • Wonkette (!), Uppity John McCain Calls Himself ‘President’
  • Atrios, Green Eyed Monster
• Let's give the final word this week to Billmon — happily returned to blogging after more than a year of silence — The Great White Hope

Note: this week's summary cuts off a bit earlier than usual due to my being in the wrong time zone…

This new anti-McCain video, THE COMMANDER IN CHIEF TEST from Humanitainment.com feels a little too harsh to be effective. That's a shame in a way, since the clips are very damning. But to my eye the overlays somehow trivialize them and reduce their sting.