Obama's Pre-emptive Strike on McCain

"McCain faces an expanding and energised Democratic Party that is desperate to retake the White House."

--The Economist, May 19, 2008


And what goes for the Democratic Party goes for their media friends as well--desperate to retake the White House. Example: Newsweek has written an exceptionally biased preventive attack on John McCain. It’s designed to help Democrats treat any McCain criticism of Obama as, in the words of McCain advisor Mark Salter, “a below the belt, Republican attack machine distortion that should discredit [its] authors.”

Here’s a statement from the Newsweek article, written by Richard Wolffe and Evan Thomas, that identifies the authors' degree of bias. Talking about how Obama may be different as president from the [highly effective] campaigner we now know, they say of Bush, “It was only after he became president that voters began to grasp Bush's failings as an executive—his disdain for expert opinion, his stubborn approach to policy or rivals, his fatal lack of follow-through.” O.K.

Some excerpts from Wolffe’s and Thomas’s pre-launch attack on the McCain campaign:

 The Republican Party has been successfully scaring voters since 1968, when Richard Nixon built a Silent Majority out of lower- and middle-class folks frightened or disturbed by hippies and student radicals and blacks rioting in the inner cities. . . It is a sure bet [emphasis added] that the GOP will try to paint Obama as "the other"—as a haughty black intellectual who has Muslim roots (Obama is a Christian) and hangs around with America-haters.

 Sen. John McCain . . . may not be able to resist casting doubt on Obama's patriotism. And the real question is . . . can—or [does he want] to—rein in the merchants of slime and sellers of hate who populate the Internet and fund the "independent expenditure" groups who . . . give a bad name to free speech.

 Team Obama has . . . a plan for the coming mud war. [They will] put McCain on the spot. . . Recently, when a reporter asked McCain, "Does it bother you at all that you might actually benefit from latent prejudice in the country?" he answered: "That would bother me a lot. That would bother me a great deal" . . .So if McCain. . . exploit[s] Obama's ties to the fiery Reverend Wright, the Obama-ites can question his sincerity—is he really the "Straight Talk" candidate?

 And if McCain can't stop others from the sort of innuendo and code that Republicans have learned to frighten voters, [emphasis added] Obama can cast doubt on McCain's credentials as a commander in chief. ("In other words . . .they can say that McCain is either a hypocrite or impotent.")

 The model is the notorious [emphasis added] Swift Boat Veterans for Truth who unfairly [emphasis added] but effectively questioned John Kerry's war record in 2004. Indeed, two of the most experienced attack artists are already gearing up[:] Floyd Brown, who produced the infamous "Willie Horton" commercial that used race and fear of crime to drive voters away from Democratic presidential candidate Michael Dukakis in 1988, [and] David Bossie, already deep into a mudslinging campaign against Obama [with his] documentary that will portray Obama as a "limousine, out-of-control leftist liberal … more liberal than [Vermont Sen.] Bernie Sanders, who is a socialist."