Barack Obama and his campaign have vowed to come out swinging and put up a more aggressive fight. Obama feels that the Republicans are liars and that he must defend his honor and his chances by hitting them hard. His newest “hard hit” is an ad that makes a bad attempt at painting John McCain as someone who has not changed.
The ad starts off with the year 1982 emblazoned on the screen and McCain with a pair of big out of style glasses and says that in 1982 McCain went to Washington. Then we see a disco ball, a huge cell phone, Rubik’s Cube, and a computer with an email icon. The narrator explains that a lot has changed since then but McCain has not. Then it disparages him because he does not use a computer and does not know how to send email.
I think the ad will backfire. I know Obama is trying to hit the younger crowd. You know that crowd. It is full of self absorbed people who seek instant gratification and who always have to have the latest and greatest electronic gadget and can’t function without a cell phone stuck in their ears. This is the crowd that cannot find Vietnam (or many countries including the US) on a globe. Obama is appealing to them by deriding a man who is of a generation that is the least tech savvy. The ad is trying to show McCain has not changed but many elderly will see it as an attack on senior citizens. Obama might lose a number of people from a generation that is the most reliable voting block by trying to appeal to those who traditionally do not show up on election day.
That is a possibility but I think Obama has made a much more serious error. He has opened up the past as an avenue for exploration. Of course he has had his army of dirt bags in Alaska trying to dig up dirt from Sarah Palin’s past but Barry does not like to discuss his own past. We know the buzz words; too young, in the past, distraction, yada, yada, yada. The past is probably on the list of things Barry will not allow to be discussed but he has opened that door.
Obama opened up his past by discussing McCain’s and he could pay for that. It will now be fair to question Obama about his drug use when he used all kinds of drugs and used them a lot. He has stated that his drug use was his greatest moral failure and that it was a bad choice. Since Joe Biden said Hillary would have been a better pick than he, we can make the case that Obama made bad choices then and he makes bad choices now.
The first pinhead who talks about McCain being stuck in the past and not about change can expect to be asked about Obama’s drug use and how he can possibly be change we can believe in when he still makes bad choices.
BTW, McCain reads email but does not send it and he knows how to use a computer (not terribly well). The Obama ad does not mention that Bill Clinton only sent 2 emails during his term and said he did not understand the internet (and the inventor of it was his VP). McCain said he talks to people by phone and that he uses the internet to read his daughter’s blog and the news. However, he is unable to type effectively because of his war injuries. NRO reports this from a story that appeared in the Boston Globe in 2000. NRO also makes this point:
Oh one last point for now: Lord knows I think the chicken-hawk arguments are stupid. And I don’t think the fact that Obama never served in the military should count against him in and of itself. But how stupid is it for the Obama campaign to claim that McCain is unqualified to be president because he can’t grasp cyber-security issues based on the fact he has never sent an email when the McCain campaign can just as easily say Obama can’t understand first order national security issues because he’s never fired a rife, flown a plane, commanded men in battle, or faced an enemy? I mean which prepares someone to be commander in chief better, hitting “send” on AOL or fighting a war? [emphasis mine]
