July 28, 2008
McCain Takes Aim At Obama's Character
Politico: Campaign Takes A New Turn, Accuses Democrat Of Putting Politics Before National Interest In Ads, Statements
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Play CBS Video Video Presidential Campaign Heats Up Down in the latest poll, Sen. John McCain has gotten tough in ads against Sen. Barack Obama. Bill Plante reports and Russ Mitchell talks to two analysts about what's next in the campaign.
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Video Fireworks In Campaign '08 John McCain has accused Barack Obama of not supporting the troop surge to secure the Democratic nomination. Obama's camp retaliated by harshly criticizing McCain's campaign. Thalia Assuras reports.
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Video McCain Irked By Obama Hype John McCain has struggled to be heard during Barack Obama's widely covered overseas tour of the Mideast and Europe. McCain pokes fun at what he calls the media's love affair with Obama in a new ad. Charlie D'Agata reports.
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Photo Essay John McCain Some call him a hero, some a maverick. Will Americans call him Mr. President?
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Photo Essay Barack Obama A look at the life and meteoric rise of the president-elect.
As Senator Barack Obama traveled overseas, the campaign against him appeared to take a decisive new turn with Senator John McCain zeroing in on his Democratic opponent’s character.
In a year when polls show an easy victory for a generic Democratic candidate, McCain has until now been loathe to employ the tack many strategists see as essential and which anonymous e-mailers and commenters with no apparent links to his campaign have been practicing since last summer: hitting Obama not on his record or his platform, but on his values and person.
The Democrat’s Achilles’ heel in this model is an inchoate sense among some voters that the new arrival on the national stage with the unusual biography-and who’s the first black nominee from either party-isn’t American enough.
Prior to Obama’s trip overseas, though, McCain had instead employed, without appreciable effect, a more conventional critique of his opponent as an ordinary politician, a “flip-flopper,” and, of course, a liberal.
On Saturday, though, McCain released a new television advertisement in which the announcer says that on his trip, Obama “made time to go to the gym, but cancelled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras.”
"John McCain is always there for our troops," adds the announcer, before concluding with the campaign’s new slogan: “McCain, country first.”
The slogan’s inverse implication for his opponent was made clear earlier in the week, when McCain accused Obama of placing the his political ambitions before the national interest.
"It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign," McCain said Tuesday in New Hampshire, in a line he’s been using regularly since.
While Republican presidential candidates have long sought to paint their Democrat foes as insufficiently devoted to the country, the military or both, McCain’s suggestion that Obama preferred to hit the gym than to visit wounded soldiers is considerably more personal than, say, President Bush’s 2004 attack on Sen. john F. Kerry for voting against bills to fund troops in Iraq. In some ways, it bears more of a resemblance to the third party Swift Boat campaign that denigrated Kerry’s service in Vietnam.
Further, McCain is uniquely qualified to make this charge, and Obama uniquely vulnerable to it.
A former naval aviator and prisoner of war in Vietnam, McCain is pressing his case against a candidate with no military experience, and who-thanks in part to a subterranean smear campaign that’s tapped a nerve with some voters who because of it or even prior to it-don’t see him as entirely or all American.
While the botched troop visit might have been the stuff of an attack ad in any case, since it was the only significant slip-up in an otherwise well-staged trip, McCain’s new ad dovetailed with the latest viral email aimed at Obama, a widely-circulated-though later recanted-missive from a Utah National Guard officer stationed in Afghanistan, Joseph Porter, who wrote that Obama "blew…off" and "shunned" soldiers during his visit there.
"He was just here to make a showing for the Americans back home," Porter wrote, though press reports contradicted some of the details provided in his email. "It was almost that he was scared to be around those that provide the freedom for him and our great country."
Obama responded with high-minded disappointment to McCain's new round of attacks, and his traveling companions in the Middle East, Senators Chuck Hagel and Jack Reed, condemned them.
"I think John is treading on some very thin ground here when he impugns motives and when we start to get into, 'you're less patriotic than me. I'm more patriotic,'’” said Hagel, a Republicanand Vietnam veteran who’s yet to endorse a presidential candidate and is rumored to be considering a cross-party endorsement.
It’s a tempting line of attack, though, against Obama, who a recent poll found that 55 percent of voters thought was the “riskier” choice for president as against 35 percent who said McCain. It’s also an attack that tap into a major source of that unease, race, and is especially likely to pay dividends with a relative newcomer to the national stage such as Obama, whose public image is not yet as clearly defined.
McCain’s turn to character also reflects his campaign’s deep, genuine contempt for Obama. As the Democrat enjoyed boffo media coverage and a warm reception at every turn on his foreign trip, McCain aides began to openly use their derisive nickname for him, "The One," mock some of his more gushing coverage, and draw a contrast between what they characterized as their candidate's demonstrated dedication to country and their rival's lip service to the same.
The tone is reminiscent of Hillary Clinton's disdainful mocking of Obama in the primary. "The skies will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect” she said, just a touch sarcastically, of her rival. Her attack is also a reminder of the difficulty in landing a clean shot on Obama.
In his book, "The Audacity of Hope," Obama wrote: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views."
While that has helped fuel Obama's meteoric political assent and may have blunted the impact of some attacks on him, it's now proving a stumbling block for many swing voters, particularly older ones. For all the media attention his historic run has attracted, not to mention the quarter-billion he has already spent introducing himself to the nation, 25 percent of respondents in a recent Newsweek poll wrongly believe he was raised as a Muslim and nearly 40 percent errantly thought he attended a Muslim school while growing up abroad.
These claims have also come up repeatedly in Politico interviews voters, including Democrats and independents.
Kathie Steigerwald, a Dearborn, Michigan businesswoman who said she voted for Hillary Clinton but now plans to support McCain, offered an especially succinct recital of a narrative on which other interviewees offered numerous variations:
"I feel John McCain is a true American and I want to support a true American," she said.
But isn't Obama a "true American?" she was asked.
"I don't know," she said after a measured pause. "I question it."
Why?
"I don't know-maybe because of his name?"
Whatever his motives, McCain’s new hit on his foe’s patriotism hints at two years of whispered, viral rumors and myths about Obama centered on his patriotism and American values, or, more to the point, his lack thereof. The emails -catalogued in snopes.com's lengthy Obama section and Obama's own “fight the smears" page -often have contradictory particulars, but the thrust is clear: Obama, various false emails claim, is not really a natural-born American citizen; is not really a Christian, and refuses to pledge allegiance to the American flag.
"[McCain] can't beat him with the old 'liberal' playbook, they can't beat him by deploying the old social-cultural wedge issues, and it seems more and more that they won't be able to beat him on readiness and experience," said Dan Gerstein, a Democratic consultant whose clients have included Senator Joe Lieberman.
"So all they really have left is the personal stuff, first and foremost what I would call fear of the other, which is mostly but not exclusively about race, and goes to visceral issues of trust."
"I'm not questionng his patriotism," McCain said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopolous. "I am saying that he made the decision [to oppose the surge], which was political, in order to help him get the nomination of his party.
"It really is the first time in the campaign where you have had the Obama online smears, of which there have been many, matching up with the actual paid negative advertising of a candidate," said Chris Lehane, a Democratic consultant.
McCain supporters rejected the notion that this new line of attack is out of bounds.
"It's accurate, effective, and timely," said Rick Wilson, a Republican consultant, of McCain's ad. "It seriously speaks to the calculated nature of the trip and Obama's own [calculating nature].”
Wilson said the questions about Obama's values and patriotism have particular potency because of his background, though he rejected the notion that race played a major role in it.
"Obama is always going to struggle with the cultural disconnect-he scans very much as liberal Ivy League elitist," he said. "People automatically put him in a box with people who are not like middle America's view of patriotism."
Jim Pinkerton, a contributor to Fox News who worked for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush and for Mike Huckabee in this year's GOP primary isn’t convinced of the efficacy of this line of attack:
"First they goaded him into going to Iraq and that was pretty successful-for Obama. And now the McCain people are trying to goad him into spending more time with the troops and going to hospitals to visit wounded soldiers.
“They better be careful what they wish for, since Obama just might screw them up and do it.”
By Ben Smith and Jonathan Martin
Copyright 2008 POLITICO
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See all 1698 CommentsIs that why after listening to petraeus who has been the leader of our resurgence in Iraq he still saw no reason to refine his strategy and continued to go with his usual talking points. Seems he doesn''''t change even if the facts prove him wrong.
Posted by alanrobisch2 at 07:41 PM : Jul 29, 2008,,,
The turn around in Iraq is working for multiple reasons, not just the `surge` alone, which is why Sen. Obama won''t commit to saying the `surge` alone is the reason. 3 things have helped Iraq stem the violence, 1) Sunni awakening and positive participation, 2) The Surge, 3) Concrete barriers all over Iraq separating warring factions from each other and I actually suggested these barriers. But with all that said, the real measurement for success in Iraq will be when the concrete barriers separating Iraqis inevitably come down and the population of Iraq is allowed to freely mix and mingle again, that will be the real test and maybe because of those barriers there is a false sense of security and success, because the violence could flare up once again.
By election time, John will probably be sitting on the sidelines, only getting votes from the raging racist and people that don''t pay attention to anything.
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Posted by tbweb at 02:38 PM : Jul 29, 2008
+ report abuse
Is that why after listening to petraeus who has been the leader of our resurgence in Iraq he still saw no reason to refine his strategy and continued to go with his usual talking points. Seems he doesn''t change even if the facts prove him wrong.
------------------------------------------------------Posted by WellHell3 at 03:18 PM
Hahahah - Had Bush listened to his Generals, namely Colin Powell, we wouldn''t be in Iraq. LOL Had he listened to Obama, we wouldn''t be in Iraq. Keep trying RowdyAzzFace. LOL
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McCain might want to look in the mirror before he ever, ever takes a shot at Obama''s character!!!
Fact is, the bravest of the two was actually McCain if you''ll remember in the ''I don''t know'' department.
With Obscamma, who the hell knows? First he mocks Bush for listening to his generals, claims he''s not doing his job because of it, then makes the statement that it''s his (Obscamma''s) job to state the mission and the generals jobs to carry it out! Then he has to refine and polish his own withdrawal plan while he listens to the generals, then he comes back from Iraq and remarks that he''s SURPRISED at the progress there...although our soldiers shouldn''t be taking so much credit. Especially when he originally screeched that all we had to do was sit down and tea TALK with the Islamofast bastwards, and now he''s ready to cowboy up and fight...
I mean, c''mon...where the hell is this guy?
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Posted by tbweb at 02:26 PM : Jul 29, 2008
So it makes sense to elect another one just like him...or WORSE!?
Posted by WellHell3 at 02:29 PM : Jul 29, 2008,,,
It hasn`t been established McCain is actually better, maybe the McCain of 2000 was, and maybe the Military smart McCain is, but overall it`s not clear cut because this `new` McCain has flipped and flopped a lot. If Obama doesn''t know something well or trust his own judgment he will refer to an expert and listen to them, not many peoples egos will allow them to do that! Obama is not scared to say "I don''t know the answer but I will find out", how many people can seriously do that? Answer: Few!
Secretary of Marketing Scam! Now he''s an expert and should certainly know how to spot one since he''s used such a great number of them in his campaign.
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Posted by tbweb at 02:26 PM : Jul 29, 2008
So it makes sense to elect another one just like him...or WORSE!?
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Posted by tbweb at 02:26 PM : Jul 29, 2008
So it makes sense to elect another one just like him...or WORSE!?
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Posted by jon2012 at 02:14 PM : Jul 29,
Frankly, I''d say, if you don''t know enough about your candidate''s voting record to know how very liberal he is...then how do you propose to know whether you want to support him or NOT!
You need PROOF of his voting record? Don''t you KNOW it already?
As a matter of fact, is there even a CABINET POSITION that Obscamma would be able to fill and provide a meaning support roll!
WOW! Come to think of it...there''''s NOT one!
Posted by WellHell3 at 02:22 PM : Jul 29, 2008,,,
O.K. smarty pants, the same can be said of G.W. Bush and that didn`t prevent him from becoming President! :)
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Posted by tbweb at 01:19 PM : Jul 29, 2008
Well it''s a for certain Senator McCain couldn''t appoint Obscamma as Secretary of Defense, now isn''t it?
As a matter of fact, is there even a CABINET POSITION that Obscamma would be able to fill and provide a meaning support roll!
WOW! Come to think of it...there''s NOT one!
Posted by JonGood65 at 11:50 AM : Jul 29, 2008
In response, I will say one word Republicans hate to hear: Proof?
in executive leadership role, military service; business,or implementing major change, resulting in unsound political policies
No judgment
resulting in his keeping company in Chicago with crooks, bombers, racists, sexists and anti-semites; divisive rhetoric, narcissism, overbearing arrogance and cronyism
No integrity
leads to broken promises, hypocrisy, under-hand political tactics, flip flops and Obama''s list of 90 Documented LIES
Barack Obama, the very junior Senator from Chicago, lacks the most basic of experience needed to be President; he is easily influenced and doesn''t have the judgment to know what he doesn''t know; even worse he lacks the integrity to learn from his mistakes preferring to use gifted oratory to deflect criticism and blame others. Thats why millions of life-long Democrats, and other moderate Americans just say no deal.
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