McCain campaign hits rock bottom

It is embarrassing to admit it now, but when McCain won the Republican nomination, I bought into the hype about how his campaign would be different from recent GOP presidential campaigns. Well, I didn't buy into it completely - but I did figure that, as someone who had been smeared by Rove tactics in the South Carolina primary in 2000, McCain would mostly focus on the issues. And after all, his primary campaign seemed pretty straight-forward and issue-based (though I paid much less attention to the GOP primary than to the Democratic one).

While there was no chance I was going to vote for him in November, I have always had a good deal of respect for McCain, and when he won the Republican nomination, I thought "well, worst case scenario, he's a lot better than Bush, and he's not going to run the kind of campaign that makes you embarrassed to be an American voter."

During the last couple of weeks, my respect for McCain has dropped almost to Bush levels. Frankly, it is astonishing how far his political brand has fallen in just three or four months. His new attack ads seem like a cry for help from a failing campaign, whose architects just didn't realize how hard it was going to be for a Republican to run in 2008.

Conservatism in general is starting to look woefully outdated in light of the kinds of problems the country faces. In an era in which a Republican administration has created a record budget deficit, and conservatives' deregulation theology helped create the mortgage crisis, there just aren't that many winning conservative issues anymore. And as I have said before, McCain's "the surge worked" mantra misses the forest for the trees completely. Look, I hope the surge has worked, and assuming it has, I hope it continues to work - but I'm still 100% against the Iraq War and the neoconservative approach to foreign policy that led to it.

Which leads me to incredibly low attack ads McCain has launched in the last week. First, McCain accused Obama of canceling a trip to a military hospital in Germany, with an ad alleging that Obama "made time to go to the gym but canceled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras." As the Washington Post has reported, there is no factual backup for the claim about cameras. Moreover, the ad's image of Obama in the gym is taken from an appearance Obama made in front of hundreds of troops in a gym in Kuwait (footage of the visit is on Youtube).

Now, McCain has released an incredibly tacky ad comparing Obama's celebrity to that of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. It is unclear why the McCain campaign thinks there is a legitimate comparison between Obama and two young female starlets who have been involved in sex scandals. And as other bloggers have pointed out, it is strange for McCain to act like Obama's celebrity, image, and magnetism are negatives, when the Republican Senator constantly refers to President Reagan - the last true celebrity to be elected President - as his political hero.

The biggest problem with McCain taking the low road is that it directly contradicts the image he's spent so long cultivating - an image that even many of us on the other side of the aisle had bought into, to some extent. His campaign's new negative approach makes him look petty and whiny, and contradicts his image as a different kind of Republican, which seemed like a crucial element in a potential McCain victory in 2008.

"McCain Captured on Video Resorting to Gonzo Attacks" [New York Magazine]