Letter From America
McCain mocks, ridicules and trivialises Obama
SENATOR John McCain has adopted the Karl Rovian tactic of attacking his opponent's strengths, defining his opponent as a caricature of himself and running against that caricature.
McCain has run ads featuring vacuous celebrities, Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, (why did he leave out Lindsay Lohan?) and comparing Obama with them. Yet, when Obama warned white voters in Missouri that the McCain campaign would attempt to make them afraid of him because of his funny name, race, and the fact that he did not look like the presidents on the dollar bills, McCain accused Obama of playing the race card!
What a brilliant strategy! Connect Obama in the redneck mind with two well-known promiscuous blonde bimbos (thereby dragging in the notion of miscegenation), and then deny any racist intent and accuse Obama of "playing the race card!" Perfect way to throw dreck at your opponent while seeming to keep your own hands clean.
McCain has mocked Obama's celebrity by interposing footage from his Berlin speech with clips of Charleston Heston as Moses parting the Red Sea in the movie The Ten Commandments. (Message: who does he think he is, God?) McCain surrogates have called Obama arrogant, naïve and full of himself. Funny, a white man displaying confidence is described as "self-assured," "dignified," and "composed," whereas a black man displaying the same traits is labeled "arrogant," "cocky" and "an uppity N!"
The plan is to define Obama is such a negative way to the American people before he has a chance to define himself, so that the negativity sticks in their mind.
McCain wants to cut Obama down to size. The ads portray Obama as full of hot air and, McCain wants to puncture his hot air balloon before it wafts away. So far, it seems to be working. Polls show that Obama's lead has evaporated and he is now tied with McCain in national polls.
America is one country in the world where television advertising determines the outcome of an election. If Coca Cola were to claim that their brand was better than Pepsi, unless they could prove it, Coke would sue them. There is no penalty for lying in political advertising. The Republicans have figured that out, and lie and mislead with abandon. Joe Six-pack takes his cue from political commercials and votes accordingly. The Democrats take the high road and lose presidential elections.
Starting with the racist Willie Horton ad that George Herbert Walker Bush ran against Michael Dukakis in 1988, to the swiftboating of John Kerry by George W. Bush exactly four years ago, the Republicans have transformed negative campaigning into an art form. The Democrats throw up their hands in dismay, screaming: "How low will they go?" The Republicans will go as low as is necessary to win, and unless the Democrats come down from their high-horse and answer back in kind, John McCain will be the next president of the US.
This election should be a referendum on Bush's disastrous eight years as president and John McCain's enthusiastic support of all the key Bush policies. Instead, the Republicans, along with a pliant media, have defined the election as a referendum on Barack Obama. Unless the Obama campaign turns it around and makes it into a referendum on McCain, Obama will lose.
The Obama campaign must attack McCain's supposed strengths: his status as a war hero. This is exactly what George W. Bush did to McCain after losing the New Hampshire primary in 2000. The Bush campaign accused McCain of committing treason as a prisoner in Vietnam. If Bush could do it, why not Obama?
Once, as he was about to take-off from an air craft carrier, John McCain's plane blew up and he escaped with minor injuries. On a bombing mission over Vietnam, McCain was shot down and imprisoned for five years. John McCain is to be commended for withstanding Vietnamese torture and refusing to be freed unless his buddies were.
General Wesley Clark caught a lot of flak from the Republicans for suggesting that getting shot down could not be a major criterion for commander-in-chief. Maybe McCain is accident-prone, but where else in the world is someone considered a war hero whose sole war exploit is having been shot down? The Obama campaign must cut McCain's war hero status down to the puny size it really is.
The Obama campaign has been too easy on McCain, even after he called Obama a traitor in an ad. (Obama "would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign"). Imagine if Obama had called McCain a traitor as Bush had done in 2000, the Republicans and the media would have jumped all over Obama and forced him to apologise.
The media is too easy on McCain. He has paid no price for his gaffes. When McCain cannot distinguish between Shias and Sunnis, when he says Iranians (Shias) train the al-Qaeda (Sunnis), when he talks about the Iraq-Pakistani border (wiping Iran and Afghanistan off the map), when he says that Iraq is the first US war after 9/11 (the first was Afghanistan), when he claims that Anbar Wakening (when Iraqi Sunnis turned against brutal al-Qaeda, with the help of 100,000 Sunnis militants under US payroll) took place after the so-called surge of additional 30,000 US troops in Iraq (it was six months earlier), and when he parodies the Beach Boys song "Barbara Ann" with "Bomb Bomb Iran," the media's reaction is "McCain is being McCain;" a geezer version of Boys will be Boys! In spite of his repeated foreign policy miscues, to the media McCain remains an expert on foreign policy and military affairs!
The Obama campaign must also point out that McCain has a ferocious temper. His nickname is "McNasty." Republican Senator Thad Cochran said of McCain: "The thought of his becoming president sends a cold chill down my spine." Added Republican Senator Pete Domenici: "I decided I did not want this guy anywhere near a trigger."
American voters need to know more, not only about Barack Obama, and the media must make sure that they also get to know the real John McCain. The last thing America needs is another crazy and trigger-happy president.
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