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Monday, September 15, 2008
Shocking! Panicky Obama levels an ‘ism’
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
You’ve got to hand it to Barack Obama and his campaign operatives. For sheer gall, they may be without peer.
After criticizing Gov. Sarah Palin as inexperienced — despite the fact that she has more executive experience than Obama, Joe Biden and John McCain combined — the campaign now takes aim at McCain’s age and his years in Washington, though Joe Biden has been there longer.
Obama is convinced he can ride the left’s hatred of George W. Bush into the White House — and continues with a new TV ad an effort to link McCain and Palin to Bush, with a personal attack on McCain
But the obvious fact that Bush is not on the 2008 ballot and McCain and Palin are is an inconvenient truth. No matter. The Obama operatives will simply run against the administration past by pledging more of the Democratic programs of the past while talking soothingly of change to voters and potential voters with short memories.
They, too, promise a new, more civil campaign — and deliver the standard trash-talk. The campaign’s latest TV ad attacks McCain personally, based on his age. It pulls a news clip of a hearing in the early 1980s where McCain is dressed in the fashion of the era. It projects other images: Rubik’s Cub, a disco ball, an outdated computer and phone. “Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn’t,” says the announcer. It attempts to tie his unfamiliarity with computers to his understanding of the economy and veers off to connect it all to “tax cuts for corporations.” It closes with a photo of McCain with Bush, describing both as out of touch.
So we have a guy with no executive experience at the top of the Democratic ticket trashing the experience of the woman who’s number two on the GOP ticket. At the same time it trashes the 26 years McCain has been in Washington, while overlooking the fact that the number two guy on the Democratic ticket has been there 36. One is “more of the same,” but the other guy’s not?
What it boils down to is that Obama is trashing McCain because of his age. In the Obama world, where he gets to decide which criticisms directed at him are allowable, age would be off-limits. It’s not, of course. In an election for President of the United States, everything that shapes a candidate’s beliefs, values and character are fair game.
The Obama attack on McCain is noteworthy because it is a reminder that Democrats are lashing out in panic. Poll numbers are breaking against them. So here we have a campaign built entirely on the failed social spending programs of the 60s and 70s trashing the old guy — resorting to ageism, one of the politically incorrect “isms” that liberals ordinarily find shocking! - to claim that McCain is stuck in the 80s.
Wierd. Oh the twists and turns of the panicky.
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