John McCain's latest attack ad stands out in the upbeat Olympics media environment.
John McCain is running attack ads against Barack Obama during the Olympics telecasts! The first time either party has run major advertising during the Games and one is going all-negative in the midst of all that positive uplift.
It's just the latest curious note in the last week of TV ad wars. Which were really the ADD wars, with both sides launching and swapping out TV ads so quickly they couldn't possibly have had any impact in actual paid airings.
The frantic nature of all this is borne out in polls, both public and private, that mostly show Obama up a few ticks in the past week after McCain's campaign -- under new campaign director Steve Schmidt (see my HuffPost profile of the former Arnold Schwarzenegger campaign manager from a month ago ) -- stopped him from gaining real separation in the race the week following his acclaimed foreign tour. Team McCain, through a relentlessly negative and mocking campaign, actually brought Obama back down to virtual parity with the Republican candidate, as I discussed in this previous piece.
What both sides have been doing in the 10 days since then is play TV ADD wars. In other words, cater to the attention deficit disorder of the cable news culture by "launching" multiple TV ads in rapid succession. This is done, as a key McCain advisor acknowledged, to drive "cable news chatter."
In other words, the ads are being used largely as video press releases. McCain's purpose being to create a media sensibility that tripped up Obama as he attempted to build a lead going into the Olympics. Obama's purpose being to create a media sensibility that strikes at the credibility of McCain's candidacy and campaign. And of course try to build that lead.
McCain rolled out four TV ads last week; Obama rolled out three. (By TV ads, I mean high-quality productions in the 30 or 60-second format that broadcast and cable requires. Not the YouTube web videos which ramble on, frequently quirkily, at whatever length, and would never run on commercial TV.)
John McCain is "the original maverick," says this ad, which actually hardly ran last week.
Last week's advertising was nearly all negative. McCain's camp touted a positive ad I'm sure the senator liked very much, casting him as "the original maverick." But it turns out that, as I suspected, according to tracking services, that it hardly ran at all as an actual ad.
What it was was bait for the media. And fodder for the McCain pushback against the idea his campaign is all about attacking Obama. Of course, the reason why McCain is competitive with Obama in this generally very bad year for Republicans is that his campaign is devoting itself to tearing down the tyro Illinois senator.
For his part, Obama's ads went virtually all negative last week. Striking back hard against McCain as a fan of Big Oil, and mocking him as a one-time maverick who is increasingly a doctrinaire conservative Republican aligned with President Bush.
My read is that McCain's regard for his legacy is a factor in how hardcore he's going to be in the race. (My read also is that, in this year's environment, McCain can't win by running a mostly positive campaign. So the more he feels pressured to be a good guy, the worse his actual chances.)
Top figures on both sides of the race told New West Notes that they think that people will be paying less attention to the campaign during the Olympics. In part because the Olympics traditionally dominate the popular media environment. In part because of the time of year and fatigue with the long and constant campaign.
The race currently looks like it's in the 3-6 point range, something top Republicans generally agree with. Which is better than it was for McCain. Of course, they were in scramble mode to prevent Obama from opening it up with the foreign tour. At one point, it looked like he might "float out of reach," with a lead of 10 points or more heading in to the Olympics period.
That didn't happen. Which was a victory for the McCain approach.
And now we're in the Olympics trough period, with Obama on an eight-day Hawaiian vacation and McCain railing against Russia's unsurprising shattering of Georgia's military forces following the foolish Georgian assault on the capital of breakaway republic South Ossetia.
Barack Obama's upbeat Olympics TV ad about a new energy economy.
Obama is up with a very positive Olympics ad. In it he speaks of rebuilding the American economy around clean tech and a new approach to energy which can free the country from its fateful dependence on oil.
McCain is up with a negative ad. This ad, again, refers to Barack Obama as "the biggest celebrity in the world," which he isn't, attacking him for being for taxes on most Americans, and government spending and, hence, against jobs. The Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania criticized this ad, like others, through its fact-checker.org for misrepresenting Obama's position on taxes.
But in hardball politics, if a piece of an attack is at least arguable, that attack will be used over and over until somebody knocks it down.
The only reason McCain is in this race is because he went heavily negative.
McCain has serious problems with his positioning in this race. That's because it looks like a change election, with vast majorities of voters believing the country to be off-track and President Bush to be a disaster.
And since McCain is much more the doctrinaire Republican than Schmidt's other most recent client, Schwarzenegger, he's already closely tied to mostly unpopular policies.
In a positive campaign this year, Obama's positioning vs. McCain's positioning is no contest.
That leaves branding. Obama's is appealing but untested. With a negative campaign against Obama, you can create enough FUD -- fear, uncertainy, and doubt -- about the exotic new figure to overcome the problem with positioning and sink the rival brand.
But is McCain, who is now on the wrong side of the positioning equation, poisoning his own brand with this constant, and personal, negativity?
McCain has some appealing maverick positions now, but he's running mostly as a conventional conservative in a bad year for that. What has been most "maverick" about John McCain is not so much his policies as his persona. And a big key to that is his image as a fun, good-spirited guy, a war hero above the simple repetition of predictable political messaging.
It may be that the McCain campaign has taken a bold and logical series of steps which are the only things keeping him in this race.
And it may also be that these steps will, nonetheless, guarantee that he cannot win the presidency.
