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Commentary: McCain’s Air War

August 4, 2008 — Without waiting for Labor Day, the traditional campaign kick-off date, the John McCain campaign has launched a series of attack ads against Barack Obama. The ads have been controversial, but have served one key purpose of the McCain campaign: To break into the media monopoly that Obama has been enjoying for the past few weeks or even months.

The first ad, which compared Obama’s celebrity to that of two young women famous mostly for being famous -- Paris Hilton and Brittany Spears -- drew a rebuke from Obama himself, who commented in several speeches that McCain was trying to scare the voters by portraying Obama as risky, because -- among other things -- he “doesn’t look like the other presidents on our dollar bills.” The McCain camp accused Obama of playing the race card and Obama stated he did not believe the McCain campaign was racist and quit using that particular line.

I will say, however, that when I initially saw the ad, the first thing I thought was how much it resembled the TV spot used against Harold Ford, Jr. in the 2006 Tennessee US Senate race. If you punched the mute button -- and many folks do when commercials, especially political ones, come on -- what you see is a couple of blonde bimbos followed in quick succession by a black man, namely, Obama. Now it occurs to me that I could make that connection because, as someone raised in the hard-core segregated South, I am well aware of the tensions surrounding any suggestions of interracial sex. On the other hand, apparently liberal columnist and commentator Bill Press made the same connection. Whether this interpretation of the ad is an example of sociologist Vance Packard’s “Hidden Persuaders,” or just the over-reaching of hyper-sensitive commentators, isn’t clear to me. I would give McCain the benefit of the doubt, but I would advise that his campaign be more careful in creating future ads.

The second ad that I saw, which a McCain campaign e-mail described as a “fun video,” derides Obama’s celebrity status by comparing him to Moses, aka Charlton Heston, parting the Red Sea. I found the ad a bit confusing. It ends with “But can he lead?” and I didn’t find the charisma attributed to Obama incompatible with leadership. Here again, my Southern upbringing might have something to do with it. I learned all the Bible stories at the Presbyterian Sunday school. So to me, being compared to Moses is pretty hot stuff.

But here again my suspicious mind detected a subliminal message in the ad. The mock-religious music and a text that described Obama in near-messianic terms made the ad about religion, not politics. And what do you think of when you think about Obama and religion? Why, Rev. Wright, for starters, and his outrageous paranoid attacks on this nation. And if you get beyond that, you think about Obama’s education in a Muslim school in Indonesia.

I’ll give the McCain camp a bye on this one as well. But you do have to wonder, couldn’t they have come up with better ways to make their point? Winston Churchill very deftly dismissed his Labor Party opponent as a man without substance with one memorable line: “An empty taxi arrived at 10 Downing Street, and when the door was opened, [Clement] Atlee got out.”

Even better, however, why not focus on what Obama says he’s going to do in office? His energy plan, with its heavy emphasis on high-cost, low-energy renewables, with only limited offshore drilling, could be a prescription for disaster. His economic plans suggest a return to the high-tax income redistribution policies of the Democrats prior to the Reagan presidency. And as for foreign policy, he refuses to endorse the one successful thing the Bush Administration has done in the Middle East, namely, the troop surge that has reduced American casualties to a new low and is facilitating a US troop withdrawal sooner rather than later.

People of good will can and will disagree about these issues, but they are genuine issues on which the candidates differ. That is where McCain should be attacking. On the other hand, if his ads focused on substance, maybe they wouldn’t get much attention.