There are now hints that the McCain campaign is preparing to hit Democratic Presidential candidate Sen. Barack Obama on his Reverend Wright association (right in the middle of a growing national political debate over the biggest financial crisis America has faced since the Great Depression).
Read the post by Hot Air’s Allahpundit who asks:
Exit question: How does six weeks of guilt-by-association one-upsmanship sound? Wright, then Hagee, then Ayers, then Palin’s church, then …?
The reasoning is that if Obama can tie McCain to lobbyists in guilt-by-association, then the McCain camp now feels it now has a right to use guilt-by-association with Wright.
It isn’t quite the same thing.
The McCain campaign itself has raised Obama associates’ ties with Fannie May — a completely legitimate subject since it’s all part of the ongoing debate over the economy and who is best to oversee it in the White House starting in 2008 and has the independence to stand back and look at what needs to be done and do it.
Playing the Wright card will be pure and simple hot-button politics, complete with all of the emotions Wright triggered. And the Demmies will indeed feel they have to respond in kind. If McCain won due to the Wright card he would enter office a President with a good section of the country polarized due to the emotions. It would also feed into a growing sense among many pundits now that the McCain campaign eschews campaigning on important vital issues and needs to whip up emotional outrage on side issues.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.