I don’t know which presidential campaign John McCain is watching, but it certainly isn’t his own. The presumptive Republican nominee held a press conference in Florida yesterday, and offered a “unique” perspective on his efforts.
* Said “I don’t think our campaign is negative in the slightest.” There are negative McCain ads running as we speak, and in the very same presser, he attacked Obama for injecting race into the campaign again.
* Blamed Obama for bringing up the issue of race in the campaign, and repeatedly said that Obama had “retracted” his charge that McCain is using race. It was obvious by the repetition of “retracted” that this was a cooked up talking point, and it was apparently a reference to the fact that the Obama campaign said it didn’t think McCain had used race in the campaign. But this wasn’t a “retraction” at all: The Obama camp hasn’t conceded he said that in the first place.
* Described a new Web ad implying that Obama believes he’s the Messiah as “having some fun.”
Isn’t “negative in the slightest.” Hmm. It seemed to me his campaign isn’t positive in the slightest, and McCain has been so relentlessly negative that even the Republican establishment is taken aback, but maybe McCain’s confused.
Let’s refresh his memory a bit. The McCain campaign has unveiled five television ads in the last two weeks. All five attack Barack Obama, and all five include obvious and demonstrable falsehoods. The McCain campaign, over the last three weeks, have unveiled five web videos. Four of the five attack Obama, and each of them are wildly misleading.
But it’s obviously not just the advertising. In his speeches and interviews, McCain has said Obama deliberately wants to lose a war. The campaign has an ad in heavy rotation blaming Obama for high gas prices. McCain and his gang spent a week pushing a bogus smear about Obama snubbing injured U.S. troops. McCain suggested Obama might be a “socialist.” The McCain campaign even hinted that Obama is weak on genocide.
But don’t worry, the McCain campaign isn’t “negative in the slightest.”
Prominent media voices, many of whom have expressed admiration for McCain, are noticing just how wrong this is.
A few months ago, I wrote that John McCain was an honorable man and he would run an honorable campaign. I was wrong. I used to think, as David Ignatius does, that McCain’s true voice was humble and moderate…
Courage is grace under pressure. McCain showed it when he was a prisoner of war, and on many issues–yes, even on his stubborn insistence that the surge would work–but he is not showing it now. He is showing flop sweat. It is not a quality usually associated with successful leadership.
It’s awfully early for John McCain to be running such a desperate, ugly campaign against Barack Obama. But I guess it’s useful for Democrats to get a reminder that the Republican Party plays presidential politics by the same moral code that guided the bad-boy Oakland Raiders in their heyday: “Just win, baby.” […]
Negative campaigning is not a pretty thing, and it should be beneath John McCain to stoop so low.
Until last week, it was an open question which of these visions of McCain bore a closer relation to reality. But with the weeklong string of attacks uncorked by the Arizona senator and his people during Obama’s trip abroad and in its aftermath — some brutal, some mocking, but all personal and focused on Obama’s character — we now have an inkling of just how deep in the mud McCain and his people are willing to wallow in order to win in November: right up to their Republican eyeballs.
As countless fact-checkers and tsk-tskers have maintained, the broadsides were a blend of distortion, innuendo, and outright slander. […]
The motor behind his operation now is Steve Schmidt, the shaven-headed strategist who earned his bones running Karl Rove’s war room in 2004, Frenchifying and de-war-heroizing John Kerry. What Schmidt and his associates have apparently concluded is that McCain’s weaknesses — on the election’s most salient issues and as a candidate — are so pronounced and Obama’s vulnerabilities so glaring that the low road is their guy’s best, and maybe only, route to the White House. They’ve concluded, in other words, that even if McCain may not be able to win the election in any affirmative sense, he might still wind up behind the big desk if he and his people can strip the bark off Obama with sufficiently vicious force.
I mention these examples — there are many more — not just to undercut McCain’s painfully ridiculous claim that his campaign hasn’t gone negative, but also because it’s media voices like these that help shape the conventional wisdom.
And if there’s a consensus that John McCain has become a small, cheap, vicious smear-monger — a description that has the added benefit of being true — it’s the kind of narrative that may affect McCain’s standing. Something to keep an eye on.