John McCain’s last desperate tactics

With Election Day less than two weeks away, the McCain campaign is stepping up its attacks on front-runner Barack Obama. To fight back, the McCain campaign has resorted to several lines of attack on Obama: painting him as a socialist, branding him as “anti-American” and using automated robocalls in at least ten battleground states. In at least one of the robocalls, the McCain campaign highlights Barack Obama’s connection to Bill Ayers, the former member of the Weather Underground.

They try to make it sound, in these calls, like Barack Obama, right now, when he’s not campaigning, is in league with domestic terrorists who are trying to kill you and your family. That’s the impression they’re trying to give, which is why they are completely false. When Sarah Palin, the other day, said Barack Obama is palling around with domestic terrorists, she used the plural, so not just Bill Ayers, but raising the suggestion that there are others out there that he’s palling around, not that he’s on a board with somebody who forty years ago was part of the Weather Underground and who has since become a pretty renowned education expert. So, they’re really trying to play on people’s fears.

Listen to what Colin Powell, what Senator Susan Collins, a Republican from Maine, are saying. Norm Coleman, who’s a Republican senator in Minnesota, he’s in a very tight race there against Al Franken. They’re coming out, and they’re rejecting these ads. There was a brave young woman in a West Virginia call center. Some of these calls are automated and robotic, and others are being done by call centers, by—when you get a live person who says the same message that you just played. And she quit her job. She said, “I can’t read this stuff.” And they said, “Great, then you can leave the call center.” So there is a big, reaction to this. And these, of course, are the same type of calls that were done against John McCain in 2000 by even some of the same firms working for the George Bush campaign at the time. But there are huge amount of opposition the calls have generated, from even within the Republican Party like Colin Powell and Senators Susan Collins and Norman Coleman.

Colin Powell gave Barack Obama a lot of cover and gave people who want to vote for Barack Obama but still may be unsure, because they don’t know him that well, haven’t seen him on the national stage for too long—was an act of reassurance for voters like that.

what’s happening here is that John McCain, is running against his own brand. In the late ’90s, in his first run in 2000, he had the reputation, whether it was well-deserved or not, as a politician who was more candid than most, who didn’t play the same old BS games that a lot of politicians do, and who ended up being victimized because he wouldn’t. And he became the victim of the George W. Bush Karl Rove campaign. what’s happened now is he’s hired a lot of the same people who come from the Lee Atwater, Karl Rove wing of the Republican Party, in terms of political operatives, and they’re running their general playbook campaign, which is attack and slash the Democrat, call them a tax-and-spend socialist, and try to distract from the real issues.

There are a couple of these conservative groups who are getting very, very desperate in the final days here, and they’re making all sorts of accusations against Barack Obama, trying to stop what they seem to believe will be his victory.

And a group called the National Republican Trust Political Action Committee has been sending out, very desperate-sounding emails to potential conservative donors, saying that Obama is dangerous and boasting that it has the killer issue that will nail him, and that is, that he supports the Eliot Spitzer plan to—to grant driver’s licenses to undocumented workers. And what they say is, under this sort of plan, the next Mohamed Atta can get a driver’s license and somehow use that in a plot to destroy America. So they’re trying to tie, the illegal immigrant or undocumented immigrant issue to 9/11 and say that’s Obama’s Achilles’ heel, we just have to scare enough people on this front. they claim that they’re taking out some TV ads on this issue.

A couple weeks ago, and certainly months earlier, David Corn was saying that he expected in the last week or two of the campaign for there to be a tidal wave of negative attack ads against Barack Obama, paid by and put together by groups like the Swift Boat Veterans for the Truth, backed by right-wing billionaires, that would just throw all sorts of dirt, untrue, at Barack Obama, and that would just be too much, at the end of the day, for him to actually respond to. But it seems that a lot of those right-wing billionaires these days are more worried about their portfolios than about helping John McCain, and we haven’t seen these campaigns coalesce, not to say that in, still in the next week that they won’t, but those independent, outside groups, a lot of people were expecting them to play a much bigger role at the end of the day here. And that has yet to happen.

Discussion: David Corn and Amy Goodman.
David Corn, Washington bureau chief of Mother Jones magazine. His latest piece, “The Right’s Final Attack: Obama is a Black Muslim, Anti-Christian Socialist Plotting with an Evil Jewish Billionaire.”

– from DemocracyNow