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McCain, Obama Campaigns Now Moving Into Full Attack Mode

October 6th, 2008
By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief

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“Of course, you know, this means WAR!”

That’s essentially the response of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama’s campaign to several news stories in which GOP presidential candidate Sen. John McCain’s campaign virtually telegraphed its intention to go intensely negative and try to turn Obama’s past associations into an issue. Then, over the weekend, GOP Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin started doing exactly that.

So now the Obama campaign says it will take off its gloves, too:

Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) on Monday is launching a multimedia campaign to draw attention to the involvement of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) in the “Keating Five” savings-and-loan scandal of 1989-91, which blemished McCain’s public image and set him on his course as a self-styled reformer.

Pushing back against what it calls McCain’s “guilt-by-association” tactics, the Obama campaign overnight began e-mailing millions of supporters a link to a website, KeatingEconomics.com, which will have a 13-minute documentary on the scandal beginning at noon Eastern time on Monday. The e-mails urge recipients to pass the link on to friends.

The Obama campaign, including its surrogates appearing on radio and television, will argue that the deregulatory fervor that caused massive, cascading savings-and-loan collapses in the late ‘80s was pursued by McCain throughout his career, and helped cause the current credit crisis.

Obama-Biden communications director Dan Pfeiffer said: “While John McCain may want to turn the page on his erratic response to the current economic crisis, we think voters will find his involvement in a similar crisis to be particularly interesting. His involvement with Keating is a window into McCain’s economic past, present, and future.”

McCain’s campaign has already taken its gloves off, so now it’s taking the skin of its fingers off with a brand, new ad flatly calling Obama “dishonorable” — in other words, shifting into what seems to be name calling mode:

The sudden spate of personal attacks continued Monday, with McCain releasing an ad called “Dangerous”: “Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are ‘just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.’ How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops. Increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and Congressional liberals. Too risky for America.”

Meanwhile, Palin reportedly is pushing for the campaign to start hammering Obama on the issue of his former pastor Rev. Wright.

All of this comes at time when the economic issue continues to rage — as European and world markets take a big hit.

Can McCain turn his campaign around by changing the subject during the last month to whether Obama is a dangerous person to have in the White House for a variety of reason (the AP and some others say the McCain campaign is indirectly raising the race issue, but it denies it)? Or will voters remain focused on the pocketbooks, their suddenly-changed retirement fund statements plus the spate of bad news on the domestic and world economic fronts?

Former Hillary Clinton bigwig Howard Wolfson argues the election is already over for McCain. But some other analysts dispute that.

Meanwhile, McCain’s move to veer the issue away from substantive issues into whether Obama is a risky person to have in the White House due to his associations, ideas and experience level compared to McCain is raising concerns now among some conservatives. The Christian Science Monitor:

Who would disagree that if John McCain was up by 10 points, the same tactics wouldn’t be used by Team Obama? Remember it was only a month ago when McCain was leading in the polls and the Obama campaign announced it would be playing hardball — and for awhile was running more negative ads than McCain.

But times are different now, say some conservatives. They look back at 1992 when the economy took center stage and see some deja vu.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, also appearing on Face the Nation Sunday, doesn’t believe a negative campaign can be successful.

“They don’t understand how the same political tactics that they’ve used before, going after liberal, liberal, liberal, that’s not going to work now because something has overshadowed it,” Brooks explained. “And that overshadowing, that economic anxiety is just going to dominate the next five weeks. There’s no way around that. And if they’re not touching that, then they’re not touching the core issue. And John McCain has not done it. And he hasn’t done it over the weekend, where they’ve been attacking Obama for being too liberal or not loving America enough.”

GOP strategist Mike Murphy, appearing on Meet the Press Sunday, shares Brooks’ point of view - to a point. He agrees that it is all about the economy and that the character game isn’t going to work. But he, unlike Brooks, thinks mentioning the L word and the potential for the L party to dominate the executive and legislative branches of government might equalize the poll numbers.

“Bring up the issue of the concept of a runaway liberal one-party train here in Washington,” Murphy told host Tom Brokaw. “You know, just no checks and balances at all. McCain, a partisan, can-do pragmatist vs. the idea that everything in this town being run by the Democrats with no restraint, no balance, no control, and that’ll affect the economy in a bad way. I think that’s a better prosecution for the McCain campaign than these character attacks…”

What is certain (1) the McCain-Obama debate this week could be a fiery one since, if McCain’s campaign is raising these issues on the stump, it stands to reason McCain will raise the issues in the debate and Obama (unless he is guilty of political negligence) will be prepared to answer in kind AND (2) the American electorate is about to see one of the most fierce final months of a Presidential campaign which will likely end in the next President entering office facing a highly-polarized electorate AND (3) this will be the real test of whether bread-and-butter and substance issues can trump personal negative politics.

UPDATE: MSNBC’s First Read:

The question we’ve got: Whom will the voters punish for the negativity? The Obama camp is gambling that McCain will get blamed for starting this fight. We’ll see. Obama’s brand could be just as tarnished if he’s seen as being too negative, and we’ve seen what the negative campaign has done to McCain’s image lately.



This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 9:24 am and is filed under Newsweek Blogitics, Negative Campaigning, Demonization, Sarah Palin, John McCain, Barack Obama, 2008 Elections, Democrats, Republicans, Politics. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Viewing 10 Comments

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    Gee, who cares what an irrelevant campaign does or does not do. It is blatantly obvious that Obama is gong to win and the only question is whether it will be by a size amount or by a landslide.

    Joe, instead of the endless posts about future trivia question answer Palin or a candidate who makes Bob Dole look competent, why not have a day where all of the posts reconciling Senator Obama's political rhetoric and policy positions with political reality. How will government reform, healthcare reform, energy regulation, or immigration look after the Demcrats in Congress pass the legislation.
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    It is perhaps appropriate that Joe introduces this latest segment of this wacky election campaign with a quote from Bugs Bunny.

    Of course, we have already seen McCain's Bailout plan stunt blowing up in his face a la Yosemite Sam. Somehow, Yosemite Sam's hot-headed character is reflective of McCain.

    I imagine that makes Senator Obama the invariably cool, unflappable Bugs. Appropriate somehow.
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    I always thought it was: “Of course, you realize, this means WAR!” Better rhythm, and twice as many hits on Google as your version.

    Obama as the cool, smartass Bronx Bunny? Works for me.
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    Wow, I thought Obama would wait to see whether McCain's smear tactics appeared to be working before descending into the gutter himself. Guess I was naive.

    Unless some unforseen event intervenes to change my mind, I will still be voting for Obama next month. That said, I'm very disappointed that he is joining this war of smears. Not just because it's politics as usual or because it's generally distasteful or because it distracts from dialogue on issues of actual importance. No, it's disappointing because of the disingenuous nature of it. McCain's ties to Keating have been revealed to be entirely benign; he's never been shown to profit from his associations and as far as anyone has been able to tell, no one was harmed because of them. Obama's campaign knows all this, yet it's pressing ahead anyway.

    This kind of cynical campaign is more likely to backfire than succeed, because Obama is proving himself to be the same kind of political animal as the man he's claiming is "politics as usual". Voters will be invited to say, "If I'm not supposed to care about Obama's relationship with Ayres, no matter how innocent, why should I care about McCain's relationship with Keating? Maybe I should look closer at both...". There's little chance this closer scrutiny helps Obama but a great chance it hurts him. His lead has been build mainly based on the public's economic fears. Anything that distracts them from that is a loss for Obama.

    A smarter rebuke for Obama, if he really wanted to use the Keating scandal or guilt by association would be to find relationships McCain has had over the years with controversial figures, maybe just a random meeting, maybe an exchange of letters, whatever. Then have an ominous voiceover reference all of these perfectly innocent meetings, "McCain once met with Noriega" or whatever, but then the punchline is to say, "You know what, all of these meetings were perfectly innocent, so don't worry about them. The McCain campaign wants you to believe Obama meeting {insert name here} was sinister, but you know better. Don't let cynical attacks distract you from the real issues that face your family..."
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    I say bring pressure to bear on Fox news. Urge a boycott. Fox news no more. I'll tell my people.
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    jkarczek,
    I understand your disappointment. But I don't think Obama can just carry on as Palin launches a bunch of character attacks. Also, the S&L scandal wasn't exactly harmless; lots of people's lives were ruined by it. More importantly, it resembles the current financial crisis and shows McCain's relationship with the banking industry.
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    I think that you need to comment on this issue, precisely because you have credibility on it. Also, Bush's campaigns actually told us quite a bit about him, and some of us should have paid more mind to it. At least some of us, who do tend to focus only on issues. This time, I'm paying more attention to these kinds of things because of the success of Rove, for example, in previous campaigns. By the way, I don't exempt the Democrats, who need to stay away from personal issues as best they can and focus on issues, especially the economy.
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    elrod,

    Yes, the S&L industry collapse DID hurt a lot of people, but McCain has never been shown to have profited from it, nor did Keating benefit because of anything McCain did for him. This has all been pretty well documented. He and his wife have had ties to Keating, but I think there is a similar figure, or ten, related to virtually every member of Congress, no matter what the party affiliation. If having an association is a justifiable reason to castigate someone, then don't we have to automatically castigate Obama for his associations, no matter how insubstantial they have been? Obama does not stand to benefit from trying to paint McCain as corrupt unless he has some new smoking gun that had heretofore been hidden.

    As for how the Obama campaign needs to respond, clearly they need to remain aggressive. The question is being smart about it, framing the issues in a way that complements the perception of Obama and his change message. This is not the way.
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    OMG....he's fighting back?

    I'm pretty sure this is the Obama camp showing that they intend to fight back instead of sitting back and taking it like Gore and Kerry. Furthermore, the public really does need to know about this