In June, the McCain campaign started running web ads with pictures of Barack Obama and President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad side by side. Under the pictures, the ad’s caption read, “Is it OK to unconditionally meet with anti-American foreign leaders?”
The point of connecting Obama to Ahmadinejad was a little ham-fisted, but it’s not as if the McCain campaign has been otherwise clever and adroit.
This month, the McCain gang has unveiled a nearly-identical web ad, this time with Fidel Castro’s picture alongside Obama’s. The caption reads, “Fidel Castro thinks [Obama] is ‘the most advanced candidate.'”
Now, McCain has clearly given up on maintaining any sense of class, so the new ad isn’t especially surprising, but as long as McCain wants to go down this road, let’s follow him a bit.
[T]he Castro advertisement actually uses the foreign leader’s words against Obama. But the quote is misleading in regards to the actual political dynamics in play. For starters, since Obama became the de facto nominee, Castro has been critical of his candidacy, arguing that he has not called for serious alterations to U.S.-Cuban relations and would willingly allow the island nation to suffer from hunger. Obama, meanwhile, has criticized Castro as a repeated abuser of human rights and a tyrant whose time has passed.
Moreover, the guilt by endorser meme is something that even McCain has disavowed. When questions started being raised about his supporter, John Hagee, the Senator washed his hands of the pastor’s controversial statements. “When he endorses me,” McCain said, months before he rejected Hagee’s endorsement, “it does not mean that I embrace everything that he stands for and believes.”
For now, it seems the McCain camp is using its Castro ad on sites catering to South Florida — obviously a politically important geographic region.
All of this is true, but I’d add something else: it was McCain who talked openly about “normalizing” relations with Fidel Castro’s Cuba.
In May, McCain visited South Florida to go after Obama for his willingness to break with a decades-old, ineffective policy towards Cuba. The problem, of course, is that McCain used to support breaking with the policy, too, before his latest transformation into the conservative Republican nominee.
John McCain told Cuban-Americans Tuesday that he would maintain the decades-old U.S. trade embargo on Cuba if he is elected president, and he attacked Barack Obama for his willingness to meet with Cuba’s leader.
Sen. McCain’s stance on Cuba appears to have evolved since the 2000 presidential primaries, when he faced Mr. Bush, then the Texas governor. At the time, Mr. Bush played to the Cuban-American exile community and Mr. McCain acted the moderate, recalling his role in normalizing relations between the U.S. and Vietnam and saying the U.S. could lay out a similar road map with the regime.
The Miami Herald reported in 1999 that McCain was the only Republican candidate who believed “there could be room for negotiation on the U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.” In 2000, McCain told CNN, “I’m not in favor of sticking my finger in the eye of Fidel Castro. In fact, I would favor a road map towards normalization of relations such as we presented to the Vietnamese and led to a normalization of relations between our two countries.”
Going back further, to 1994, McCain opposed cutting off remittances because it punished people “whose misfortune it is to live in tyranny.” The old McCain, in other words, clearly isn’t on the same page as the new McCain.
And yet, there’s McCain’s new ad, showing Castro and Obama side by side. Note to McCain: there’s only one candidate in this race who talked publicly about normalizing relations with Fidel Castro. I’ll give you a hint: it’s not Obama.