Please see this blog entry ["No Conversations": McCain Troops Ad] to go with this post.
The McCain campaign had adopted an ad strategy that has been dubbed "desperate" by Time Magazine political columnist Joe Klein. Klein was writing in response to this latest ad from McCain's new ad/communications honcho Steve Schmidt.
Klein writes that a candidate airs tis ad only if: "1. You're desperate.
2. Your Middle East policy has been superseded by events and abandoned by your allies. 3. You apparently have nothing substantive to say about America's future role in the region and the world."
"If you watched both Obama and McCain on the morning shows today, you saw one candidate who was at ease, confident but not flawless (Obama's answer on the Surge still seems too grudging), and another who was tense and almost entirely negative. There used to be another John McCain—charming, open, unpredictable. I wonder where he went; the McCain who appeared on the air today seemed too much a scold, too little a statesman."
Obama's cancellation of a visit in Germany to visit wounded U.S. troops has been adequately explained: that his campaign was advised by the Pentagon that since Obama was on a campaign trip and spending campaign resources, it would be viewed as using the wounded as props whether cameras were allowed in the hospital or not.
This ad asserts a McCain campaign talking-point that Obama wouldn't make time for wounded troops unless cameras were allowed to follow him, but did make time to work out at a gym. This, of course, is a lie. It's a blatant lie. Steve Schmidt, a disciple of Karl Rove's who worked on George W. Bush's 2004 ad/communications effort, though, is playing the Rovian playbook that says that it doesn't matter if it's true as long as your target audience (non-college educated white working class voters) won't bother to find out the actual truth, and believe that it "sounds like it might be a true."
http://www.businessweek.com/the_thread/brandnewday/archives/2008/07/the_new_normal.html?chan=search
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