We had been waiting for this ad for days now, and we had gotten to wondering whether it would come at all as the GOP appeared to have scaled back its commitment to attacking Obama directly on the Ayers connection and instead was pushing the press to take up the matter. No longer: McCain used very tough language today, declaring on Charlie Gibson that Americans “will care” about Ayers. “I have every right to insist that he be candid and truthful with the American people,” he said. “And he needs to be asked about it, and he needs to be forthcoming.”
And tonight, the RNC’s independent expenditure arm is out with the first ad released by an outside group to hit Obama on Ayers. The RNC had already aired an ad hitting Obama for his ties to Rezko - but Ayers had not been mentioned. This spot hits Obama for doing things the “Chicago way,” by which is meant corruption and radical politics:
And there goes the dynamite! Ayers is one of the GOP’s main silver bullets - or so they hope - and they have connected him with other figures of Obama’s past to connect Ayers to other talking points and attempt to paint an overarching portrait of Obama as a risky choice that Americans do not know enough about. Enough voters harbor doubts about Obama (as was evidenced by his weakness in general election polling among registered Democrats for much of the spring and summer) that this wave of attacks could work by feeding preexisting perceptions.
And this effort will certainly not be nuanced: McCain surrogate and former Oklahoma Governor Frank Keating brought up Obama’s past drug use and called him a former “guy of the street.” (How can that not be described as a racial reference? when was Obama a guy of the street? when he was in Hawaii, when he went to Columbia and Harvard, or when he was an Ivy League graduate in the South Side?) a stark reminder of how tame the primary season was. The one Clinton official to bring up Obama’s drug use, Bill Shaheen, had to resign from the campaign).
A few issues the McCain camp should worry about, however:
- Was the McCain campaign ready for this, and did they know it was coming? The spot comes from the RNC’s independent expenditure division, which is not allowed to coordinate efforts with the McCain campaign, so does it correspond to the McCain campaign’s wishes? (This is precisely the reason that I have long said that Obama’s money is worth more than the combined sum of RNC and McCain’s dollars, since there isn’t one Republican group that can control the message.) On the other hand, this could allow McCain to not have to defend the ad as his own (though RNC expenditures are certainly closer to home than 501s or 527s).
- The RNC’s ads will only air in a few states; it has been confirmed that it will go up in IN and WI (and previous RNC independent buys never aired in more than 6 states, one of which was Michigan). So is this a real and full buy or is it one that is only designed to get the media talking? Furthermore, will the McCain campaign release a similar ad targeted at other competitive states?
- The circumstances of the ad’s release highlight once again the difficult position the GOP is in right now. They were surely hoping the ad would create some splash and put Ayers on the front page - but the Dow plunged more than 600 points today, meaning that the stock market has crashed about 1700 points since the beginning of the week. The constant drip of dismal economic news guarantees that the economy remains the top story - and obscures anything else.
Meanwhile, Democrats might get an opportunity to put the McCain campaign on the defensive tomorrow, as the troopergate report will be released. The Alaska Supreme Court had agreed to hear the case of Republicans who were arguing that the case had now become politicized and the investigative committee should not be allowed to go public with its findings, but the court just rejected the GOP’s plea, paving the way for the Legislative Council’s investigator to release the Troopergate report tomorrow.
Today, reports emerged of a sworn statement Todd Palin gave to the investigative team in which he awknowledged having talked to a dozen of state officials in an effort to get Mike Wooten fired. That said, it is of course impossible to know what the report will conclude, but it could prove embarassing for the McCain campaign at a time it was finally looking to move past the Palin distractions. At this point, the two vice-presidential nominees are secondary characters, and they will only have an impact if they make a gaffe or are implicated in a large controversy, and we have known from the very first minute Palin was selected that troopergate had the potential to be the latter. It is a risk the McCain campaign took (though questions remain about how much they vetting they had done) and they will know tomorrow whether it backfires even more than it already has.
McCain is bedevilled by poor timing. The RNC ad will be drowned out, as suggested, by the Dow collapsing today AND the Troopergate report which will not be glowing for Palin.
So Ayers get a little mention, the longer Ayers is mentioned in passing the more Obama gets inoculated against it because people and the media will think “we have heard this before”. McCain is doing the only thing his campaign can do now but it is desperate and dishonourable for a “hero” and “maverick”.
What will happen if Obama attacks Palin’s AIP connection? Will sexism be alleged? It would be interesting to see what happens. First Read also reported that Obama has bought 30 minute advertisement spots on primetime network TV for Oct 29.
Guy, the Troopergate report is likely to be eclipsed by the Dow falling likely below 8,000 tommorrow. The Japanese Nikkei just crashed 10%.
Stan - Dow collapse eclipses Troopergate which eclipses Ayers. Obama will be happy with that since he has only 26 days to get through and Ayers relegated to third (or lower) place helps him.
CNN is reporting that there are some significant errors in the ACORN registration forms. This is troublesome. The rest of the garbage fr4om the GOP is background noise, but significant registration fraud on the part of ACORN could lend some force to the otherwise meaningless Ayers/”street guy”/Chicago politics crap. We better keep an eye on this story.
For the rest of it, the murderous rage that McCain is stoking in the mouth-breathers will haunt us for years. McCain may both lose the election and what little remains of his honor. I’ve always been skeptical about the concern that Obama faced an extraordinary threat of violence. I’m not so skeptical now.
Yes I saw the story. But was ACORN founded by Obama? What else is there to this story?
When are you going to change your electoral map? It is disconcerting to read about Obama’s surge in the polls yet see an electoral map that seems to be saying the opposite.
I hope Obama uses his CBS half hour to examine all McCain’s double-speak (bitter enmity against Pat Robertson whick evolved into kissing his *ss; opposition to Bush which became the famous ‘hug’, champion of financal firm deregulation then whoops! syddenly the opposite; & so on and on) and also McCain’s part in the Keating 5 scandal. Interspersed with this should be the positive messages that Obama stands for, and repeating, again and again, “We just can’t afford four more years of the same policies.”
McCain is like a gila monster. It’s not enough to whack it to pieces with a hoe, you then have to kill each piece separately.
zoot,
Why are the conservatives jumping so quickly on the ACORN report? Is this their new silver bullet? What does Obama have to do with this? Did he or his campaign coordinate the registration efforts through that organization?
Palin’s ethics problems should be a bigger issue, and the hypocritical conservatives need to wake up and equally examine all candidates’ records, not in a way that portrays the guilty as less so and the innocent as guilty. If Palin, for example, is found to have abused Alaskan law, she shuld be treated accordingly; and if her husband is a secessionist or used to be a secessionist, then he should be treated accordingly. But that is not what the Republicans are doing. They accuse the media of bias when the media does not represent their ideology/mindset but rather bases its reporting on available evidence, but if the media attacks Obama with falseholds, they rejoice like wild pigs. Such double standard needs to cease. These Republican voters seem gullible and fickle and foolish.
Anon 1:31 - Agreed on the ‘if they’re not with us’ mentality of the Right. It fits nicely with their conspiracy theories about the MSM. You hear the same complaints from the PUMA bunch - they’re in the tank for Obama, etc.
As far as ACORN is concerned, I believe there are some links, that Obama coordinated with them during the primary season. If you accept Kristof’s theory that there is a great deal of latent or unconscious racism abroad, evidenced by voter hesitancy to embrace Obama, this is the kind of thing that can trigger it and provide a ‘rationale’: community-type activism in a minority community/they’re corrupt/voter fraud/Rezko/etc. Pure BS, but every negative campaign aims to paint a picture of the opposition, and this might be a piece of that.
In its ad, the RNC is implying…what, exactly?
These guilt-by-association attacks use innuendo without saying anything specific. If the claim is that Obama is corrupt (Resko), why not just say it? If the claim is that he’s liar out of the typical political machine (Daley), why not just say it? If the claim is that he approves of terrorism or won’t try to keep us safe (Ayers), why not just say it?
The won’t say it because they don’t have anything to back it up. Or they lack the courage to say what they really mean. The former would mean they’re liars, the latter would mean they’re wimps. And that may be why these attacks aren’t really effective.