Faithful Democrats
Discussing the McCain campaign's latest attacks
When
we watch this advertisement, with its similar imagery and the exact same bitter message as "The One"
ad that came before it, we also should realize that more are to be
expected in the weeks to come. The McCain campaign has found a negative message that works: it is one that interweaves the idea of Obama as an overblown celebrity with the blatant assertion that Obama is a false messiah figure. As seen below, the election is now polling at a statistical dead heat after Obama's support has declined rapidly in aggregate polls over the past few weeks.
We can expect this type of an advertisement — i.e. these religion-themed attacks — to
continue, just as the same "celebrity" tact that portrays the "O-ba-ma"
chants as coming from overzealous mobs has been used in ads here , here , here , here , and here in the past week alone.
The GOP has stockpiled an artillery of ads that are variations on this theme; and once the Democratic Convention begins in Denver and tens of thousands
gather to hear Senator Obama accept the nomination, the McCain campaign
will release another one of these advertisements maligning Obama as nothing more than a celebrity — and even
a false messiah. Yet just as we will surely see more recurring images of crazed crowds and are likely to have to deal with more of that same up-close profile picture, which shows Obama smiling next to words like "Painful Taxes," "Hard Choices For Your Budget," and "Not Ready to Lead," you can bet that we have not seen the last of Charlton Heston and these false prophet / unprepared leader ads.
Some might say that these pieces are just meant to be funny and that those who don't "get the joke" should just lighten up. That's fine, but even if you believe that, then we should at least scrutinize why, and by whom, this ad is being made in order to understand their intentions in taking this bizarre approach. So let's start to break it down. The new anti-Obama ad begins with the words "A Worldwide Sensation. Millions of Views." There are so many distortions happening here all at once:
First, the "sensationalism" described in this ad was sparked by McCain's vicious attacks in the first place. Why are there 1,265,453 visits to the YouTube video site? It has more to do with the fact that people found this ad repugnant and that the McCain camp stirred up controversy, did it not? We know this because thousands upon thousands of people have viewed the YouTube clip and, repulsed by these malicious attacks, have requested that it be removed. The amount of attention drawn to the YouTube site through the petition from the Matthew 25 Network alone is evidence of this, so let's be clear about the illogical reasoning underpinning the "1,265,453 visits makes Obama a sensation" claim from the very start.
Second, it's important to keep in mind who is creating this "sensation" in the first place. Obama never claimed the "celebrity" appellation — it was a slanderous association that the GOP chose to concoct because their positive ads for Senator McCain only attracted one-tenth of the attention that these outrageous, and even blasphemous, ads could garner (released the same week as the first "The One," the "Broken" ad still only has 96,448 visits). The McCain camp is twisting its position here by attacking Obama as a celebrity but then, as many have claimed, analogizing him with popular imagery of the anti-Christ . The goal is to criticize the very same picture they are painting of Senator Obama in the first place. Why do this? The simple reason is that it obfuscates the real source of the excitement about his campaign. Attacking Obama's strength allows the GOP to create an image of Obama that is loosely based in what voters recognize about his popularity already. In so doing, the McCain camp manages to malign what has been a practically unprecedented groundswell of political support and excitement that the Obama campaign has cultivated from the grassroots. In just a few seconds of negative campaigning, McCain's strategists are attempting to turn the tables on Obama's message of hope and the months and months he and his supporters have spent doing door-to-door campaigning and engaging in discussion about the real issues.
Third, and I have to add this, 1,265,453 visits does not make "millions." That is a million and change. To have millions of views, you'd need to have something like the following clip: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU. This video has over four million hits and is something of substance, which brings us all together rather than divides us and gets us all talking rather than disparages us. While messages like this one from the Obama campaign shed light on what is really important, the McCain campaign has chosen to instead turn ugly by using religion to demean Senator Obama.
Above all, this is wrong because it distracts the debate away from the serious issues at hand. Senator McCain, when you talk about your first "The One" ad as "sparking the flames of the faithful," not only are you being insulting and condescending to Christians, but it also just shows how out of touch you are with the way many people of faith will perceive your latest ad. That "flame" you have included because it made for convenient mockery is in fact the way in which the movie The Ten Commandments represented the pillar of fire. For Jews and Christians, this was the way God led his people by night during the Exodus, the light serving to illumine their path through the wilderness. Your attack ads are not illuminating anything new or constructive; instead you are funneling your funds into ads that are full of claims about false prophecy and even darker sublimation. Your campaign staff put these images on our screens because they saw it as an opportunistic way to fit images to words, regardless of what Biblical meaning you were stripping away. Do they realize how incredulous it makes so many people of faith to know that you would continue to stoop so low — even to the very point of employing montages of Biblical imagery for political gains in political games? Perhaps. But do they realize that in referring to Senator Obama as "The One" they are mocking him as "The Chosen One" and thus making him into a substitute Christ figure; and that when they refer to the "Road to Denver," they are eliciting thoughts of the Promised Land? Certainly they do. All of this was absolutely intended. And it might even be considered an acceptable, if strange, way of attacking your opponent in order to inculcate doubts.
But Senator McCain, "His Hand Guides The World?" Really? You would go so far as to claim that Barack Obama has laid claim to be God Himself? This is more than mockery, Senator McCain. By making claims like these and continuing to use imagery from the Left Behind series in these ads, your campaign has traversed from the inane to the manipulative, and then from the absurd to the malicious.
You should be the first to know that we have seen all of this type of malicious, "weird-but-it-works" subliminal messaging before:
http://graphics.boston.com/news/politics/campaign2000/news/Bush_s_attacks_on_McCain_taking_their_toll_on_Bush+.shtml | Date: 1/23/2000
Not to put too fine a point
on it, but George W. Bush has attacked John McCain in a television
commercial for sins he has not committed on the basis of information
whose veracity Bush cannot support and in violation of a promise he
made with McCain that he sealed with a public handshake. And he keeps attacking
fellow preppie Steve Forbes for the crime of negative campaigning,
which he and his supporters are themselves engaging in with rapacious
intensity.
http://archives.cnn.com/2000/ALLPOLITICS/stories/02/11/campaign.wrap/index.html | Date: 2/11/2000
In a presidential campaign where negative sound bites are becoming
increasingly common, John McCain pledged Friday to halt attack ads
aired in South Carolina against GOP rival George W. Bush — and urged
the Texas governor to do the same…. Earlier in the day, Bush and McCain traded attacks from the campaign
stump. At a rally in Ladsen, South Carolina, Bush lashed out against
McCain for taking donations from the same lobbyists he routinely
condemns.
http://www.boston.com/news/politics/president/articles/2004/03/21/the_anatomy_of_a_smear_campaign/ | Date: 3/22/2004
Having run Senator John McCain's campaign for
president, I can recount a textbook example of a smear made against
McCain in South Carolina during the 2000 presidential primary. We had
just swept into the state from New Hampshire, where we had racked up a
shocking, 19-point win over the heavily favored George W. Bush. What
followed was a primary campaign that would make history for its
negativity.
In South Carolina, Bush Republicans were facing an
opponent who was popular for his straight talk and Vietnam war record.
They knew that if McCain won in South Carolina, he would likely win the
nomination. With few substantive differences between Bush and McCain,
the campaign was bound to turn personal. The situation was ripe for a
smear.
It didn't take much research to turn up a seemingly
innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an
adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa's
orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical
treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.
Anonymous
opponents used "push polling" to suggest that McCain's Bangladeshi born
daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a
voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which
candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the "pollster"
determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements
designed to create doubt about the senator.
Thus, the "pollsters" asked McCain supporters if
they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he
had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative,
race-conscious South, that's not a minor charge. We had no idea who
made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made.
Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.
Some aspects
of this smear were hardly so subtle. Bob Jones University professor
Richard Hand sent an e-mail to "fellow South Carolinians" stating that
McCain had "chosen to sire children without marriage." It didn't take
long for mainstream media to carry the charge. CNN interviewed Hand and
put him on the spot: "Professor, you say that this man had children out
of wedlock. He did not have children out of wedlock." Hand replied,
"Wait a minute, that's a universal negative. Can you prove that there
aren't any?"
Campaigns have various ways of dealing with smears.
They can refute the lies, or they can ignore them and run the risk of
the smear spreading. But "if you're responding, you're losing."
Rebutting tawdry attacks focuses public attention on them, and prevents
the campaign from talking issues.
We chose to address the attacks
by trying to get the media to focus on the dishonesty of the
allegations and to find out who was making them. We also pledged to
raise the level of debate by refusing to run any further negative ads
— a promise we kept, though it probably cost us the race. We never did
find out who perpetrated these smears, but they worked: We lost South
Carolina by a wide margin.
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/us/politics/04mccain.html | Date: 2/4/2007
Senator John McCain, intent on succeeding where his freewheeling presidential campaign of
2000 failed, is assembling a team of political bruisers for 2008. And
it includes advisers who once sought to skewer him and whose work he
has criticized as stepping over the line in the past.
In 2000, Mr. McCain, Republican of Arizona, said the advertisements run against him by George W. Bush,
then the governor of Texas, distorted his record. But he has hired
three members of the team that made those commercials — Mark McKinnon,
Russell Schriefer and Stuart Stevens — to work on his presidential
campaign.
In 2004, Mr. McCain said the Swift Boat Veterans For Truth advertisement asserting that Senator John Kerry
of Massachusetts had not properly earned his medals from the Vietnam
War was “dishonest and dishonorable.” Nonetheless, he has hired the
firm that made the spots, Stevens Reed Curcio & Potholm, which
worked on his 2000 campaign, to work for him again this year.
In
October, Mr. McCain’s top adviser expressed public displeasure with an
advertisement against former Representative Harold E. Ford Jr.,
Democrat of Tennessee, that some saw as having racist overtones for
suggesting a flirtation between Mr. Ford, who is black, and a young,
bare-shouldered white woman, played by a blond actress.
The
Republican committee that sponsored the spot had as its leader Terry
Nelson, a former Bush campaign strategist whom Mr. McCain hired as an
adviser last spring. In December, just weeks after the Ford controversy
broke, Mr. McCain elevated Mr. Nelson to the position of national
campaign manager.
Taken together, the moves provide the strongest
indication yet that Mr. McCain intends to run a far tougher campaign
than the one he ran in the 2000 primary. And they come as he
transitions from being a onetime maverick to a candidate seeking to
gather his party around him and create an air of inevitability about
his prospects for winning nomination.
Senator McCain has surrounded himself with political hacks who choose to attack their opponents rather than engaging in positive messaging that works. These people are willing to go to any lengths to create a message that has resonance with negativity, fear, and distrust, no matter how far down the low road they must travel to get there. This election is about so much more than these fatuous, and heinous,
mischaracterizations about Senator Obama. The months to come should be so much more
important than these games, Senator McCain, even if they "work" by instilling doubts among some voters while angering others and making us all lose sight of what is important. This election is not only about "the economy,
stupid." It is also about the economy, not stupidity,
because even as you spend time and money making foul attack ads like these, millions of
Americans are watching the days of August creep by, knowing that they
will not be able to afford all of their bills once the calendar turns
to September. And this election is about those least fortunate among us who can only
wish that bills at the end of the month were their worst worries — and
not the hunger they are experiencing tonight and the worse pangs of
knowing that their children are suffering the same.
This election should be about so many more important things than your negative and degrading messages will ever allow. This election is
about the future of our country and the great many injustices we hope to resolve at home. It is
also about the moral crises we face — or should be facing and too
often choose to disregard — regarding Georgia, and Pakistan, and Iraq,
and Afghanistan, and Sudan. Sixty-four people died in Pakistan because
of a Taliban attack today
. Estimates say that 200,000 people have been forced to flee their
homes. Approximately that same number, 200,000 people, have lost their
lives in Sudan and 2.5
million have been driven from their homes in Darfur since rebels took up arms in 2003.
These are the real moral issues of our day, Senator McCain, and rather than having a
healthy public policy debate about how we improve on these problems, you and yours
think you can continue toying around with subliminal messaging and keep up the onslaught of negative political ads like these. You are playing the same old political games to vilify your opponent that were once used against you — thus you are proving that you are no better, even when it comes to using religion to do so. It
is time to put a halt to these malicious attacks. Senator McCain, if
you really are the Maverick you claim to be, then be enough of a
statesman — and enough of a man — to stand up to the Rove-Run
Republican Attack Machine. Rather
than avoiding the tough questions by hiding behind the innuendo of bitter politics manifested in ads
like The One, make the choice to stand confidently on
the platform of your issues. Put the artillery of false messiah and celebrity ads away, tell us what is really important to you, and then let the people decide on the best man who deserves to win on November 4th — the one whom the people feel is best equipped to deal with the serious issues of our time.
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