Saturday, September 13, 2008

Dirty politics

There's no doubt that Presidential elections are dirty and that dirty politics can pay dividends. So far the McCain campaign is outplaying Obama's by 4 touchdowns. Obama's been knocked off balance by McCain's VP nominee - when truly he'd have been better off ignoring her as much as possible - and throughout this week Obama has looked unsteady and tetchy coming under assault from the McCain team. None of the shots has been outrageously cheap or ugly, but they're just enough to be getting under Obama's skin.

Obama's being lured into a trap. The strategy, clearly, is to wipe the 'cool' off Obama's image with the voters. They're begging the Obama team to respond in kind. First Obama fumbled with his "lipstick on a pig comment" and now they've rolled out a new attack ad.
The advertisements — among the most pointed attacks to be put out by Mr. Obama — depicted Mr. McCain as he looked when he was first elected to Congress in 1982 and mocked his declaration that he does not use a computer or send his own e-mail messages, attempting to undermine the new argument from Mr. McCain that he is the candidate of change.
Might have been a good idea for Obama's campaign team to find out why McCain doesn't use a computer. This is from Forbes from 2000 (via Instapundit).
In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate's savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. "She's a whiz on the keyboard, and I'm so laborious," McCain admits.
Now Obama's mocking McCain for his war injuries. That might not be a winner.

So now McCain just has to wait a day or two to let that ad settle into the voters' minds and then he can roll out his own ad with this same story about how he can't use a keyboard due to the injuries he suffered in Vietnam, which again hammers home the message about his character that dominated the convention.