Hey, media, let’s make a deal! How about you talk about Edwards’ affair exactly as much as you talk about McCain’s?
Integrity
This excellent video by evilempire919 shows us how much John McCain lacks. Great work!
Maverick No More
McCain put out an ad today featuring past compliments from various Democrats. The DNC responds.
No Maverick
Suggestion
From a friend of mine:
“This is a tire gauge. It’s a simple device, and it will help you get better mileage out of your car. John McCain and his
supporters$520 shoes think you’re too dumb to know how to use one of these.I’m Barack Obama and I approved this ad.”
Update: I do like this actual quote from Obama (via Atrios):
Now two points, one, they know they’re lying about what my energy plan is, but the other thing is they’re making fun of a step that every expert says would absolutely reduce our oil consumption by 3 to 4 percent. It
Start Your Week Right
That’s code for “He’s uppity”
Many thanks to Talking Points Memo for catching the roundtable on “This Week”, which featured a very interesting and nuanced discussion of the racial overtones of McCain’s advertisements.
The whole discussion was overall one of the best I heard on this controversy, and I listened to a lot of these conversations last week. The entire discussion is online at ABC.
Mosh
Desperation Politics
From Robert Greenwald.
Don’t forget to sign the petition urging John McCain to stop his sleazy campaign ads.
Dogwhistling
The Spin Cycle blog at Newsday does some research, after talking with McCain’s campaign about their latest “Celebrity” ad:
Sex celebs: Why Britney and Paris?
…They said they thought the ad was legitimate because Obama is a big celebrity…and Britney and Paris were Number 2 and 3.
The problem: Anyone with even a vague sense of pop culture knows that Britney and Paris are yesterday’s news. Here’s a link to Forbes’ Celebrity 100. Paris and Britney don’t even make the list any more.
…So, they didn’t pick other big celebrities, who were either men, or black, or married.
What they picked was two sexually available white women.
And that’s exactly the image the McCain camp wanted you to see, with the undertones of miscegenation beneath the obvious theme of fame.
The media ran with it yesterday, of course, giving the ad much greater reach by playing it over and over again. And even though Harold Ford on MSNBC said he didn’t think it was racism in play, it was, just as it was with the “Call Me, Harold” ad which was used against Ford himself.
The Obama campaign’s response ad is pretty good, but they have to move faster on this stuff. While they spent a couple of days meeting with experts in economics, we lost several news cycles to repetitions of McCain talking points. Of course economics is more important in the larger scheme of things, but we still have an election to win, and no time to waste in responding to these smears.
BagNewsNotes has more detailed analysis of the images in the “Celebrity” ad.
If you’re uncertain about the exact meaning of “dogwhistle”, see this post by Digby. She understands it all.