"McCain's Disdain: Not Playing Well" from the Nation:

[amborin]

"Not "The Senator," But "That One"

by John Nichols

The proper, respectful and appropriate description for an foe in a debate between two senators is "the senator" or -- if there is a desire to get flowery -- "my distinguished colleague."

But Arizona Senator John McCain, who after a quarter century on Capitol Hill surely knows the political etiquette, could not bring himself to refer to Illinois Senator Barack Obama as he would any other colleague.

Discussing a 2005 Senate vote, McCain said, "There was an energy bill on the floor of the Senate loaded down with goodies, billions for the oil companies, and it was sponsored by Bush and Cheney. You know who voted for it? You might never know. That one," he said, motioning toward Obama. "You know who voted against it? Me."

That one?

That one?

If Obama had referred to McCain as "that one," he would have been attacked for showing disrespect or ridiculed for being so new to the Senate that he did not understand the basic behaviors of the chamber.

Either way, it would have been a devastating moment.

And it should be for McCain, as well.

Understand what the Republican nominee was doing.

He did not slip up.

The McCain campaign and its media acolytes have for weeks been spinning the notion that Obama is running as some sort of messianic character who sees himself in something akin to Biblical terms.

In internet advertisements, campaign spin and talk-show commentary, Obama is mocked as "the one."

A McCain Web commercial from earlier this year compared Obama with the Nazarene. That ad opened with the announcer declaring, "It shall be known that in 2008 the world will be blessed. They will call him 'The One.'"

The ad proceeds to ridicule Obama's high-minded rhetoric before closing with the narrator telling Americans: "Barack Obama may be 'The One.' But is he ready to lead?"

That commercial has long been recognized as one of the more amateurish cheapshots from a campaign characterized all too frequently by amateurish cheapshots.

Now, John McCain has brought the cheapest of the cheapshots to the debate stage.

It was, for a senior senator who has embarrassed himself too many times during this long campaign, a uniquely embarrassing moment."

<http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/369738>

[amborin]

1. McCain Steals and Twists Obama's statements in new ad:

"The Pitchfork in McCain's Road

by Leslie Savan

John McCain's new line, "Who is the real Barack Obama?" has so incited the crowds at his rallies that one furious man on Monday answered the question with "Terrorist!" And Palin's catchy phrase that Obama has been "palling around with terrorists," i.e., former Weatherman Bill Ayers, led one of her acolytes to scream, "Kill him!"

The ad McCain released yesterday is a few pitchforks short of those sentiments, if only because the gap between what the McCain campaign can say about Obama in ads and what the increasingly frustrated GOP crowds on the stump want to hear has grown in exact proportion to the Democrat's lead in the polls.



The idiotic insistence that we don't really know Obama--that behind his smooth facade the black guy could be, who knows?, plotting jihad--is hardly a new attack from the right. McCain himself has been asking the question in one form or another all summer; it's just that he's now pronouncing it more sharply and loudly to better stir the fears of the dwindling number of voters who haven't tuned into the campaign until recently.

But this spot does present the smear in some curious new packaging. Like, why the multitude of TV screens? Perhaps the ad's producers simply wanted a stylistic change from the standard one-visual-per-insinuation. Of course, banks of television sets have long been used in commercial and political ads, most recently by the Republican Senatorial Campaign Committee to make Al Franken look like he was behind bars, cut off from the outside world.

In the McCain spot, though, the many TVs reinforce a different sense of inside/outside. The wall of shiny television screens says that Obama and those liberal Dems are the insiders, the media elites, who are always on TV, while the rest of us, like Sarah Palin, are the outsiders, the real folks. We outsiders don't get filmed, just flammed.

The stack of tubes is also a stand-in for an imaginary mountain of evidence that's piling up--Barack caught on tape!--as if the case against him has simply grown irrefutable.

Let's go to Exhibit A, the oft-repeated snipe that Obama "says our troops in Afghanistan are 'just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.'" Maybe Palin has taken this distortion and run with it because she thinks it'll single-handedly zero-out Obama as the Swiftboaters did John Kerry for daring to speak of the U.S. soldiers' atrocities against Vietnam civilians.

But the full context of the quote shows that not only wasn't Obama criticizing troops in any way, he was talking about how we need more troops in Afghanistan, to put in practice Petraeus's "clear and hold" tactic so that more civilians aren't killed there.


Now you have narco drug lords who are helping to finance the Taliban, so we've got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops that we are not just air raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous problems there.

Obama, who said this at a New Hampshire townhall meeting in August 2007, has long held this position, one that McCain has only recently come around to. But the way the McCain campaign twists the quote makes it sound unpatriotic to be against killing civilians. (Something McCain did, and told the New York Times's R.W. "Johnny" Apple he regretted, when bombing North Vietnam.)

As for Obama and "Congressional liberals vot repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops," well, technically, they have, at least a couple times. But so has McCain, technically--a point that Joe Biden made in the VP debate, when he explained that each side has voted "against" troop-funding in Senate bills when the bill has either called for the withdrawal of troops from Iraq (McCain voted against this funding) or omitted timelines for withdrawal (some Democrats, including Obama, have voted against these). (For more detail, go Factcheck.org and scroll down to "Correction Oct. 3")

But as McCain is hoping, facts can be trumped by fear of the unknown, which, of course, is what he's trying to foment with the query "Who is the real Barack Obama?" Aware of it or not, McCain is a habitual, if clumsy, user of psychological projection, as we could see yesterday when he bemoaned Obama's "touchiness every time he is questioned about his record." My friends, let us ask, Who is the real John McCain? "

<http://www.thenation.com/blogs/campaignmatters/369484/the_pitchfork_in_mccain_s_road>