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Anatomy of a Smear Campaign a la McCain |
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The Strategy for the McCain campaign seems to be attack Barack Obama no matter what he says or does, no matter how low the attack may be. The lesson that John McCain seems to have learned from his experience as a candidate in 2000 is that you can say anything you want about your opponent, no matter how inaccurate or slimy, as long as it helps you win. In other words the McCain strategy is now to run a smear campaign. How can we recognize a smear campaign? One political observer explains it this way:
The premise of any smear campaign rests on a central truth of politics: Most of us will vote for a candidate we like and respect, even if we don’t agree with him on every issue. But if you can cripple a voter’s basic trust in a candidate, you can probably turn his vote. The idea is to find some piece of personal information that is tawdry enough to raise doubts, repelling a candidate’s natural supporters…
It’s not necessary, however, for a smear to be true to be effective. The most effective smears are based on a kernel of truth and applied in a way that exploits a candidate’s political weakness.
That seems to be an accurate description of current McCain tactics. And who is the observer who explained the elements of a smear campaign above? None other than Rick Davis, John McCain’s campaign manager in both 2000 and the current presidential races. The irony is that Davis wrote that description in an Op-Ed for the Boston Globe in 2004 when he was describing the disgusting tactics of the Bush campaign in the 2000 primary - especially the dissemination of the false story that McCain had an illegitimate black daughter. The use of push polling and viral emails to the voters of South Carolina helped spread the story and McCain lost South Carolina big. But Rick is obviously a good learner and has decided to implement those kinds of tactics.
Let’s look at two recent examples of McCain lines of attack on Obama. First is the attack on Obama, also turned into a campaign ad, that Obama didn’t visit the troops in Germany because there were going to be no cameras at the event. The truth, that the Pentagon told the Obama campaign that none of his political staff could join him, including a retired General that was a military adviser, was of course no interest to the McCain campaign, with the candidate himself claiming that he wouldn’t listen to the Pentagon and would have found a way to visit the troops anyway. How do we know that this is a mere political smear tactic rather than an honest political debate? Because of this information that was published in a Business Week blog post by David Kiley:
What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was…wait for it…using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that’s political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents—a lie.
So no matter what Obama did in Germany, the McCain machine had their smear tactic at the ready. Either way the attack takes a potential concern by the voters — that Obama is an inexperienced, ambitious and arrogant attention-seeker — and then takes a lie — that Obama wouldn’t visit troops because cameras wouldn’t be there (cameras had never been scheduled to join Obama on that venture), and repeat it over and over, with the right-wing propaganda tools of talk radio and Fox Noise repeating the charges as though they were fact, and you get the false story out there as though it is legitimate, despite the truth.
The smear campaign continues today as Obama travels the country, warning voters of these tactics:
“So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” he told voters in Springfield. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other Presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.”
So how does the McCain campaign respond? Not by telling voters all of the policy differences that their candidate has with Obama. Not by showing all of the policy speeches that McCain has delivered. Those responses wouldn’t be divisive enough. Instead they accuse Obama of “Playing the race card.”
“Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong.”
And who delivered this zinger? None other than Rick Davis.
Smart comments. So how should Obama fight back agains these smear tactics? Critiquing them on blogs won’t be enough, as John Kerry doubtless knows too well.