By any reasonable measure, the over-analysis and parsing of campaign ads effectively jumped the shark earlier this month, when one conservative blogger started pointing to racist messages on children’s pajamas in Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ad. I’m disinclined to follow in the same direction.
That said, John McCain’s campaign released its very first general-election ad this morning, and there are a few elements that stood out, even for those of us who aren’t paranoid.
For those who can’t watch clips online, it begins with McCain giving a speech, saying, “Keep that faith. Keep your courage. Stick together. Stay strong. Do not yield. Stand up. We’re Americans. And we’ll never surrender.” An announcer voice-over adds, “What must a president believe about us? About America? That she is worth protecting? That liberty is priceless? Our people, honorable? Our future, prosperous, remarkable and free? And, what must we believe about that president? What does he think? Where has he been? Has he walked the walk?”
At that point, the ad cuts to footage taken while McCain was a prisoner of war in Vietnam. Asked his rank, a young McCain responds, “Lt. Commander in the Navy.” Asked for his official number, he says, “624787.”
The voice-over then concludes, “John McCain: The American president Americans have been waiting for.”
It’s that last line that’s probably the most provocative.
Obama, of course, delivered a speech on Super Tuesday that said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” The McCain ad, meanwhile, argued that McCain is the “American president Americans have been waiting for.”
So, why use the word “American” twice in the same sentence? Media consultants, especially when creating presidential campaign ads for the general election, don’t waste so much as a syllable. The sentence would have sounded just fine if it said, “John McCain: The president Americans have been waiting for.” But the campaign wanted to add that one extra word.
Michael Crowley noted:
That’s an awfully conspicuous formulation when your opponent has been accused of being unpatriotic and of murky foreign origin. All the more so given that it echoes Obama’s line, “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Am I reading too much into it?
I don’t think so.
As for the 11 seconds of interrogation footage, I suspect this is largely a matter of taste. Some will see this as yet another reminder of what McCain had to endure during his military service as a young man, some will see this as ghoulish. I assume the focus groups must have liked it, or the footage wouldn’t have been included.
It did remind me, though, of what McCain had to say about these kinds of tactics. In 2004, for example, he criticized John Kerry for reminding voters of his own heroic service. McCain said he was “sick and tired of re-fighting the Vietnam War,” and disparaged Kerry, saying his emphasis on his military record is “clearly a tactical or strategic move.” McCain said he intentionally avoided talking about his service during his 2000 campaign.
And yet, eight years later, he’s building a campaign ad around interrogation footage taken from a Vietnamese prison. It’s quite a departure from McCain’s previous strategy.
Update: Farhad Manjoo joked that the campaign shouldn’t have been so subtle and could have gone with this tag-line: “John ‘America’ McCain: The American president Americans have been waiting for, in America.”