While no presidential campaign is innocent when it comes to trading jabs, the recent Obama ad that targeted John McCain’s inability to use a computer set a new low for standards and political sportsmanship. In the ad, the Obama campaign painted McCain as “out of touch” and unable to operate computer technology.
In formulating the ad, the Obama campaign thought it would be clever to tie together outdated imagery (a picture of McCain from the 1980s with large glasses and an out-of-style suite, a disco ball and other such images) with accompanying words about the economy, tax cuts and other Republican positions on important economic issues. In the end, the overarching goal was to tie McCain to Bush, thus showing that McCain’s policies and world view do not jive with contemporary realities. But, the method of reaching this conclusion and the words used to do so are unsetting and unbelievably insensitive:
“1982, John McCain goes to Washington. “Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn’t.
Why would a legitimate presidential candidate authorize an advertisement that makes fun of one’s literal disability? McCain’s physical inability to use a computer has been published in the past. The Obama campaign must have assumed that the American people would be too inept to know that McCain’s past war injuries prevent him from regularly using computers. Or, the campaign was simply so desperate to regain a lead in the polls that it sunk to such subhuman levels.
John McCain cannot lift his arms high enough to comb his own hair, let alone sit at a computer desk and endure the unbelievable pains it would take for him to string together a few typed sentences. Thus, making fun of this makes Obama a political playground bully — a title both candidates pledged they wouldn’t hold during this presidential campaign. Sure, both campaigns have told half-truths and distortions in their political advertisements, but this targeting of a well-known disability is disheartening and wrong-headed on all counts.
And while I am no fan of Joe Biden, his statements on the matter are quite intriguing. Even Biden believes that the computer ad went way too far. When asked about the matter in an interview with Katie Couric he said the following:
At least there’s someone in the Obama camp who has the integrity to speak the truth. Forget worrying about the “teaching sex ed to kindergartners” issue; Obama seems to have a “let’s make fun of those who are disabled or less fortunate” mantra brewing. Anything to win the presidency, I suppose.
Billy Hallowell writes a regular column at www.billyhallowell.com and is actively involved in political advocacy and conservative projects.
From factcheck.org, and for the record:
McCain can type. But using a keyboard for long periods is uncomfortable for him. He says he’s been an “illiterate” on a computer. But he says now he’s learning to use the Internet.
So the Obama ad is factually true. And it’s being criticized for using classic marketing strategy to make the point that McCain is out of touch.
What’s laughable and outrageous is that the party that invented slimeball campaign advertising and distorted, misleading messages and imagery (think Willie Horton, the 2000 campaign against Max Cleland and against McCain himself, and yes, “teaching sex education to kindergartnersâ€) is calling “foul.†And has the balls to talk about a “new low for standards and political sportsmanship.†And being “insensitive?â€
But let me toss the question back to you, Billy:
Why would a legitimate presidential candidate –especially one whose entire campaign is built around an image of honor, integrity and “straight talk†– why would that candidate authorize so many advertisements that are patently misleading and false?
Why would he allow himself to be associated with a campaign that KNOWS it is lying, but operates on the theory that if it tells those lies often enough, they will be believed?
That’s right out of the Joseph Goebbels propaganda playbook.
While you’re trying to answer that, spare us the lecture about “standards†and political sportsmanship.
The harsh truth is that John McCain has sold his soul – and his honor.
Anything to win the presidency, I suppose.
Billy — if you think it’s only pointy-headed liberals who have seen through the myth of John McCain and who have serious doubts about his fitness for the White House, here’s what a card-carrying conservative has to say:
McCain Loses His Head
By George F. Will
Tuesday, September 23, 2008; A21
“The queen had only one way of settling all difficulties, great or small. ‘Off with his head!’ she said without even looking around.”
– “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland”
Under the pressure of the financial crisis, one presidential candidate is behaving like a flustered rookie playing in a league too high. It is not Barack Obama.
Channeling his inner Queen of Hearts, John McCain furiously, and apparently without even looking around at facts, said Chris Cox, chairman of the Securities and Exchange Commission, should be decapitated. This childish reflex provoked the Wall Street Journal to editorialize that “McCain untethered” — disconnected from knowledge and principle — had made a “false and deeply unfair” attack on Cox that was “unpresidential” and demonstrated that McCain “doesn’t understand what’s happening on Wall Street any better than Barack Obama does.”
To read the Journal’s details about the depths of McCain’s shallowness on the subject of Cox’s chairmanship, see “McCain’s Scapegoat” (Sept. 19). Then consider McCain’s characteristic accusation that Cox “has betrayed the public’s trust.”
Perhaps an old antagonism is involved in McCain’s fact-free slander. His most conspicuous economic adviser is Douglas Holtz-Eakin, who previously headed the Congressional Budget Office. There he was an impediment to conservatives, including then-Rep. Cox, who, as chairman of the Republican Policy Committee, persistently tried and generally failed to enlist CBO support for “dynamic scoring” that would estimate the economic growth effects of proposed tax cuts.
In any case, McCain’s smear — that Cox “betrayed the public’s trust” — is a harbinger of a McCain presidency. For McCain, politics is always operatic, pitting people who agree with him against those who are “corrupt” or “betray the public’s trust,” two categories that seem to be exhaustive — there are no other people. McCain’s Manichaean worldview drove him to his signature legislative achievement, the McCain-Feingold law’s restrictions on campaigning. Today, his campaign is creatively finding interstices in laws intended to restrict campaign giving and spending. (For details, see The Post of Sept. 17; and the New York Times of Sept. 19.)
By a Gresham’s Law of political discourse, McCain’s Queen of Hearts intervention in the opaque financial crisis overshadowed a solid conservative complaint from the Republican Study Committee, chaired by Rep. Jeb Hensarling of Texas. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, the RSC decried the improvised torrent of bailouts as a “dangerous and unmistakable precedent for the federal government both to be looked to and indeed relied upon to save private sector companies from the consequences of their poor economic decisions.” This letter, listing just $650 billion of the perhaps more than $1 trillion in new federal exposures to risk, was sent while
McCain’s campaign, characteristically substituting vehemence for coherence,
was airing an ad warning that Obama favors “massive government, billions in spending increases.”
The political left always aims to expand the permeation of economic life by politics. Today, the efficient means to that end is government control of capital. So, is not McCain’s party now conducting the most leftist administration in American history? The New Deal never acted so precipitously on such a scale. Treasury Secretary Paulson, asked about conservative complaints that his rescue program amounts to socialism, said, essentially: This is not socialism, this is necessary. That non sequitur might be politically necessary, but remember that government control of capital is government control of capitalism. Does McCain have qualms about this, or only quarrels?
On “60 Minutes” Sunday evening, McCain, saying “this may sound a little unusual,” said that he would like to replace Cox with Andrew Cuomo, the Democratic attorney general of New York who is the son of former governor Mario Cuomo. McCain explained that Cuomo has “respect” and “prestige” and could “lend some bipartisanship.” Conservatives have been warned.
Conservatives who insist that electing McCain is crucial usually start, and increasingly end, by saying he would make excellent judicial selections. But the more one sees of his impulsive, intensely personal reactions to people and events, the less confidence one has that he would select judges by calm reflection and clear principles, having neither patience nor aptitude for either.
It is arguable that, because of his inexperience, Obama is not ready for the presidency.
It is arguable that McCain, because of his boiling moralism and bottomless reservoir of certitudes, is not suited to the presidency.
Unreadiness can be corrected, although perhaps at great cost, by experience. Can a dismaying temperament be fixed?
“At least there’s someone in the Obama camp who has the integrity to speak the truth.”
What kind of commentary is this? If you pretend to call people to moral account, why not get your facts right first, and then give others the benefit of the doubt. That would show integrity as well as truthfulness.
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