The Obama attacks may be damaging the John McCain “brand” in the long run, according to a growing chorus of Republican supporters and admirers, including McCain’s mother who calls one of the ads “stupid.”
But the candidate himself isn’t backing off. On radio yesterday, he compared an Obama speech to “watching a big summer blockbuster, and an hour in realizing that all the best scenes were in the trailer you saw last fall.”
Long-time McCain watchers see ventriloquism in all this by Karl Rove protégés who have taken him over. McCain’s 2000 campaign manager calls the Paris Hilton-Britney Spears commercial “clumsy, juvenile, and a mistake” while David Gergen parses the Charlton Heston ad calling Obama “The One” as “code for ‘he’s uppity, he ought to stay in his place.’ Everybody gets that who is from a southern background.”
More here.