McCain Goes Negative

"I intend to run a clean campaign. That's what the country wants and deserves." John McCain

That was then. This is now. Last week McCain began repeating the refrain, "Senator Obama would rather lose a war if it helps him win a political campaign." Today he released commercials saying, "Obama went to the gym instead of visiting the troops," and offering the explanation, "Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras."

With 100 days to go until the election, McCain has already abandoned his clean campaign pledge and resorted to smear and innuendo. Why is he taking his tactics from the Nixon and Rove playbooks all of a sudden? Well, as reported here on July 5, at the beginning of this month the McCain campaign underwent a major shakeup that placed a number of former Rove operatives in charge of his effort. It took them three weeks to craft a plan and now it is unfolding.

Events have not been kind to McCain of late and there is also some sense of desperation in this lashing out. Obama's successful foreign trip contrasts sharply with McCain's lackluster one to Latin America. McCain's characterization of the downturn as "psychological" and his advisor Phil Gramm's dismissal of its victims as "whiners" did not score well on the empathy scale. Even the Bush administration contributed by negotiating with Korea and Iran and accepting the idea of a time "horizon" for getting out of Iraq, whose Prime Minister endorsed Obama's withdrawal schedule.

McCain has not been able to stay on message or take the initiative, so it was considered "time" to go negative. But you can tell this was foreseen by the decision to hire Rove's hatchet squad in the first place. It's simply how they run things. The charges themselves are outrageous. The first is an allegation of treason, actually trying to lose a war. This goes well beyond saying he disagrees with Obama's plan, and actually posits active disloyalty. It is a despicable slur.

The second is full of a number of lies which must have been well known to the McCain campaign. McCain knows that the "gym" Obama went to was in Kuwait and was full of adoring troops who watched Obama shoot some hoops, address them and stay to talk with many one-on-one. The ad itself used a military photograph of Obama with the basketball but blurred the background so the television audience could not tell the gym was full of uniformed American service members who appeared jubilant to see Obama. Obama went to three hospitals recently without "cameras" to visit wounded soldiers. The military objecting to one planned meeting at the Landestuhl Hospital in Germany caused the campaign to cancel that one visit. The McCain ad then seized on that to spread the innuendo that Obama refuses as a general policy to respect and honor U.S. military service members. It is another invented smear of the kind Nixon in the more distant past and Rove in the nearer past have favored.

Negative campaigning is often effective. That is why it is being used. Part of Obama's appeal is to stand for a different kind of politics. The Obama campaign's initial response to the onset of the 2008 version of "swiftboating" was to remark it was unfortunate that McCain was abandoning his pledge to conduct a civil campaign. We should expect to see effective rebuttals from the Obama camp. They have been expecting this, had to deal with a fair amount of it in the primaries against the Clinton forces, and showed a strong ability to turn much of it against its users.

Still I do not think we have seen the last of this by a long shot. This kind of politics is the kind McCain's current team specializes in. It would be most welcome if, for the first time in quite a while, the American electorate were to turn its back on the tactics of slander and character assassination. The Democratic Primaries this year were a hopeful start. Let's hear what the candidates propose as solutions to the many problems the nation faces. I'd appreciate seeing the major networks, papers and news magazines make it clear when politicians engage in deceit to make scurrilous points. If that is how they act in order to gain power, how can we expect them to act once they have it?