The Obama campaign has apparently decided to dial up the volume of its attacks against John McCain. Stung by Obama’s clear drop in polling the fall of his favorability ratings, his team must have realized that it could not continue to simply respond to McCain’s attacks (a new ad released yesterday answered McCain’s charge that Obama would increase taxes on the middle-class by arguing that Obama’s plan would lower taxes three times more than McCain’s) and that the time had come to go on the offensive.
In his stump speech today, Obama spent a long time attacking McCain for being out of touch with the economy, referring back to Gramm’s “whiner” comment and mocking McCain for suggesting that someone who makes $3 million is part of the middle-class. This follows Obama’s new-found aggressive tone over the week-end, when he ripped into McCain’s straight-talking image. Ever since he came from Hawaii, Obama has been much more direct in his attacks on McCain.
But there is a more subtle change in Obama’s attacks: Until now, Obama had been seeking to portray McCain as out of touch because he was beholden to Republican economic policies and closely tied to Bush’s record. Their latest effort is the clearest suggestion that Obama realizes he cannot just attack McCain’s policies, and that the only effective response to the “celebrity” ads is one that questions McCain’s character in return.
As soon as word spread that McCain had not been able to tell Politico how many houses he owned in an interview (the answer is “seven”), Democrats sensed they had an opening and prepared to pounce on the opportunity.
It’s difficult to know what catches on the electorate’s imagination, what succeeds at defining a candidate, what gets endlessly covered by the cable channels, but chances are McCain’s inability to say how many houses he owned could become an important story. Why did John Edwards’s $400 haircut and the size of his house become so important, for instance? Probably because Edwards’s campaign was centered on poverty and people questioned his sincerity. Over the past month, McCain has been relentlessly attacking Obama for being an elitist worried about the price of aragula and drinking expensive iced tea; that doesn’t really fit with the perception that McCain himself has so many houses that he has lost count.
The GOP has to at least be reassured that there is no video of his comments; Politico will post the interview’s audio, but that’s just not the same thing. But Democrats are determined to make a push for it. Said Tim Kaine: “He couldn’t count high enough apparently to even know how many houses he owns.” Jonathan Martin of Politico reports that the Obama campaign has moved extremely fast to exploit McCain’s comments and are deploying an army of surrogates to make the case that McCain is out-of-touch:
Governors, members of Congress and state legislators will hold conference calls and press conferences in front of homes to draw attention to the issue. Party leaders such as Tennessee Gov. Phil Bredesen and Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius, on the stump in Ohio and Iowa respectively, wil move to incorporate the matter into their remarks on the campaign trail today in an effort to draw local media attention to the story.
Further, some state parties will hold contests in which Democrats seek out real voters who don’t know how many houses they own. And in other states, ordinary citizens who have been victim of the mortgage crunch will hold press availabilities to contrast their plight with McCain’s wealth.
Within hours, the Obama campaign shows no intention of backing down and released an ad within hours:
Earlier in August, the campaign sought to put the spotlight back on McCain and started to use his own words against him on economic matters, something Democrats had expected Obama to do have done a long time before. The ad also features a quote of McCain saying that the economy is strong - yet another indication that Democrats plan to use as many of McCain’s quotes as possible. And the final tag line “McCain: Just more of the same” accompanied by footage of the Arizona Senator embracing President Bush, is now closing all of Obama’s attack ad.
That might seem expected and somewhat cliché, but it is impossible to overstate the extent to which Bush is a drag on McCain. The latest NBC poll released yesterday found that 77% think McCain is too close to Bush and Obama has to drive that point home. The tagline also serves as a useful counterpoint to McCain’s “Country First,” suggesting that the Republican is too tied up in his party to put national interests before his own.
One important note, however: This ad will run on national cable TV, not on networks in battleground states. In other words, this will be a fairly small ad buy that is intended to (1) introduce the topic of McCain’s wealth in the political conversation and (2) get as much free media as possible, forcing news outlets to write up stories about McCain’s houses and his “$5 million” comments, something they might not have done otherwise. If the ad works, the Obama campaign could choose to take a bigger buy. This is exactly what McCain did with the original “celeb” ad.
The GOP response has been particularly combative. On the one hand, the McCain campaign managed to use the POW card once more (!): “This is a guy who lived in one house for five and a half years — in prison.” The RNC’s memo is particularly combative, noting that “$13 million wouldn’t even pay for one of John Kerry’s houses” and going on to invoke Rezko: “He and his wife did not get a sweetheart deal from a fraud embezzler like Tony Rezko to buy their houses. But the Messiah did. The Messiah got all kind of sweetheart deals with Rezko, and who knows who else.” (Is the number of time the GOP uses the word “Messiah” in a statement proportional to how irritated they are? How worried?)
Also this week, the Obama campaign released two state-specific attack ads, both of which end with the tagline “McCain: Just more of the same.” In Nevada, Obama released a first ad hitting McCain’s support for Yucca Mountain two weeks ago. Now, here is another, and the tone is definitely a bit harsher. One of the speakers accuses McCain of “not caring” about Nevada, while the ad blasts ad McCain’s quote “I am for Yucca Mountain” through the screen - as clear a statement as Democrats could use.
The Yucca Mountain attack was not enough to help Kerry in 2004, even though he made it into a big issue. Four years later, not much has been resolved and Nevada is still a battleground. At the very least, these ads will force McCain on the defensive in Nevada.
Meanwhile, Obama is airing an ad specific to Georgia - not the state you would expect a Democrat to invest this much resources in. It uses McCain’s association with Ralph Reed, a figure from the Religious Right who was involved in the Abramoff scandal and who is now fundraising for the Arizona Senator. Reed was a politician in Georgia (he lost the GOP nomination for Lieutenant Governor in 2006 in his attempt at a comeback) which explains why Obama is airing the ad in that state only:
You might remember that a national ad released by Obama last week was set to run in all the states he usually invests in except Indiana and Georgia, leading me to speculate that the campaign was scaling back its investment in those states. A few days ago, Obama released an Indiana-specific ad, and now it is putting in money in Georgia, confirming that the campaign is not planning on giving up on any of the 18 states it is targeting. And given that the reason to scale back investment is usually lack of money, the campaign has no reason to go there for now.
I’m glad to see the ‘aggressive’ approach from the Obama campaign. I knew it would be coming, but I thought it might not be until after the conventions, when 1) Obama will have finished the job of introducing himself, and 2) the Obama campaign will have the huge financial advantage over McCain. I think it was rolled out now not so much because of what is happening in the polls, which I’m sure was anticipated, but because of what the polls were doing to Democratic morale–the Obama high command wanted to stem the outbreak of Nervous Nellieism from Democrats who can’t get the swift boats of 2004 out of their heads.
What will be interesting to see is not the polls, but the mainstream media response. Will they start doing stories about the wealth McCain has (married into) based on McCain’s flub, as Taniel speculates? Or will we see the ‘centrist’ pundits, the Broders and the Schieffers, cluck-cluck ‘how dare Obama question the character of an authentic American hero’? Mainstream media hostility is the main risk in Obama’s new tone, and it has to be run (you can’t let them dictate your tactics the way Gore and Kerry seemed to let them do). But it has to be acknowledged; it may be one of the prime reasons Hillary Clinton will not be on the ticket
Obama’s campaign is running with the whole house, wealth thing now because the gaffe is so recent and follows on from him saying just 5 days ago that $5million income is where rich kicks in. They need to paint him as out of touch and uninterested in economic. McCain has given the Dems plenty of material with the “the economy is sound”, Gramm’s “whiner” comments, the shoes etc etc.
Obama’s campaign is also learning that going negative seems to be relatively cost free as it has worked for McCain. Some will argue it will effect Obama’s image but McCain’s image was of a straight talker, honorable etc and he has paid no price (so far) for going negative. Sometimes the pundits just talk and should be ignored. The CW has been wrong so much this year.
I agree with Steven that this raises mroale for the Dems going into the convention. Actually the timing is pretty much perfect and McCains counter ad about rezko will be lost in the whole VP announcement, convention storyline for the next 6-7 days and then we go into the GOP VP announcement and convention storyline. So the GOP will have used the Rezko weapon and its effect will be severley limited and overshadowed and then the media will not be interested in it later because it has already rolled out.