Seat at the Table

McCain’s trying hard to prove he’s not a continuation of the Bush celebrity, but his latest moves may prove otherwise.  First McCain hires members of Karl Rove’s team (and even questions about Rove’s influence cause problems – http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,377208,00.html), then he puts out a classic attack ad.  McCain’s latest ad (below) pushes to core Obama attack lines: 1) that he’s going to increase our dependence on foreign oil by opposing offshore drilling; and 2) that he’s pushing higher taxes.

The problem for McCain is that there area easy counter attack lines for both these messages and the commercial as a whole smells a lot like Bush era scare tactics using making fact time claims that have a fairly shallow basis – something voters may be very wary of at this point.  From Obama’s perspective, it’s easy to show how he’s in fact against foreign oil and may try to wean the nation off oil (even T Boon Pickens will side with Obama on this…not good for McCain).  As for higher taxes, Obama’s main tax message has been on too many tax breaks for the wealthy over the last few years while the rest of the nation saw little gains in earning.  

One early indicator can be seen in the last two months of blog posts.  Just in the last week there is an update of posts that come up with McCain and the keywords rove, negative, and attack ads.  All these are words that, with an average politician would not be a big deal. But this is supposed to be John McCain, the non-Bush (Rove), non negative, non attack-ad politician. 

Per some of my previous posts, I wonder how much reputation forecasting the campaign management did before putting out this commercial.  While negative campaign works (sadly), did they also consider how this particular type of negative campaign may be overplayed?  Did they also calculate how doing commercials that go against McCain’s historical appeal of being a straightforward, no spin politician may cause a greater than average backfire?  If they did, I’m betting their calculations were off.  We’ll find out soon enough.

Watch the ad here :

And Obama’s reply: