OK, folks. This is going to be all right. The Obama team has got its groove back. They have a wonderful new ad out, called "Honor." It begins with a clip from McCain back then (2000?) saying, "I will not take the low road to the highest office in this land."
Then it flashes up quotes from various news publications (Time, WaPost, etc): 'the sleaziest ads ever,' 'truly vile,' 'dishonest smears that he repeats even after being exposed as a lie,' 'a disgraceful, dishonorable campaign.'
And it concludes, "It seems deception is all he has left."
Blogger Joseph Romm (Huffington Post) says this is the winning strategy for Obama, and it sounds like they get it, beginning with Claire McCaskill's great line on This Week yesterday: "You know, honor is talked about a lot in this campaign. Honor comes with honesty. And you've got to be honest about the facts."
As Romm points out, attacking McCain's honor allows them "to turn all of the ongoing lies by and about Palin -- which are presumably designed to goad the Obama campaign to go after her, rather than McCain -- into a character attack against McCain." It also allows any future attacks by McCain to be reframed as another example of McCain's dishonesty and dishonor.
And it even takes a page from the Karl Rove playbook: attacking your opponent's strength. McCain's honor has been a hallmark of his image. But the difference in the Democrats using it against him is that he has destroyed his honor himself; we're not manufacturing some presumed low road attack using distortions and lies, as Rove does -- just pointing out the obvious.
The Romm post is worth reading: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-romm/obama-nails-the-winning-m_b_126479.html
There seems to be a groundswell of pushback on the McCain campaign strategy of lying ads, and it's building rather than going away. An Associated Press article begins with:"The 'Straight Talk Express' has detoured into doublespeak." Even FoxNews' Megyn Kelly challenged McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds about the McCain lies pretty aggressively.
Karl Rove's statement that McCain had gone too far seems more an evaluation as campaign strategy (if you make claims that can easily be refuted by fact, they backfire) than as a question of character and honor. And who knows what ulterior motives Karl may have in saying it. But at least I think we can take it as a negative comment on the strategy of it.
So -- as blue Monday comes to a close (and I'm not even going to think about what happened on Wall Street) my blues have been lifted by a ray of sunshine. There's hope again. And as a bit of icing on the cake, there's a late afternoon flash that Colin Powell, while saying he's still reserving his options, he did say that an Obama election "would be electrifying."
Ralph
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I'm beginning to feel the gloom lift a bit too. Your reasons are encouraging. Mine are much simpler. The news from Wall Street today is frightening. It's a jolt of reality that paints the triviality of the recent days in the campaign in relief. In the last 28 years, we've had 20 running under something called "Reagan-omics" - a loose rationalization for irresponsible government characterized by deficit spending, feeding the Military-Industrialist Complex, and unregulated capitalism. It's coming home to roost, and it's not pretty. There's more "trickle down" gloom to come and it's not going to be lost on the voters where this misery originated. Our problems - mortgage crisis, oil crisis, massive debt, failed wars, are of our own making. Today's Wall Street story is a much needed wake-up call. And Obama was right on top of it in today's speechifying...
You're right. The headline on Huffington Post tonight says: "Hello, Economy; Goodbye Lipstick."
According to predictive models, this couldn't possible be worse for the Republicans.
It also will probably make it more of a focus during debates. And I'll bet that Palin knows even less about complex economic issues than she does about national security.
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