CQ TODAY ONLINE NEWS
Aug. 22, 2008 – 1:02 a.m.
Presidential Campaign Turns Negative and It’s Not Even Labor Day
By Jonathan Allen, CQ Staff
Barack Obama and John McCain traded sharp attacks over their personal homes Thursday in a slugfest that portends increasing vitriol during the stretch run for the White House, despite the fact that both candidates had long ago talked about their desire for a high-minded campaign.
Obama, who has seen a tightening of the polls in recent weeks, seized upon presumed Republican nominee McCain’s admission that he did not know offhand how many homes he owns and for joking that he defines “rich” as making $5 million per year. (Here is the video of the McCain response so that you can see it in context).
Criticized by fellow Democrats for not striking back aggressively enough at McCain, Obama zeroed in on him during a stump speech in Virginia in the morning and in a television advertisement released in the afternoon.
“I guess if you think that being rich means you’ve got to make $5 million and if you don’t know how many houses you have, then it’s not surprising that you might think the economy was fundamentally strong. But if you’re like me, and you’ve got one house or you are like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don’t lose their home, you might have a different perspective,” Obama said.
Obama’s campaign launched a television ad shortly after midday on the subject, called “Seven” - a reference to the number of homes the McCains were thought to own at the time.
The McCain campaign fired back with an ad linking Obama’s home to Tony Rezko, a high-dollar Chicago political donor who was recently convicted on unrelated corruption charges.
“ Barack Obama knows a lot about housing problems. One of his ‘biggest fundraisers’ helped him buy his million dollar mansion,” the announcer says, according to a script provided by the McCain campaign.
The ad accuses Obama of doing favors for Rezko and notes that Rezko is now “a convicted felon.”
When Obama bought his $1.6 million Chicago home - a property Rezko toured with him - Rezko’s wife bought an adjacent parcel of land on the same day from the same owner. Obama, who maintains he did nothing illegal or unethical in his land transactions, later bought one-sixth of the second property from Rezko’s wife for one-sixth of the price she paid for the property. Obama has conceded that the purchase of land from his political contributor a “boneheaded” mistake.
Not surprisingly, Republicans take a less charitable view of the transactions.
The Republican National Committee built a Web site dedicated to Obama’s relationship with Rezko.
McCain’s campaign clearly needed a way to distract from McCain’s own miscue, and the Rezko ad appeared to be aimed at that purpose.
The intensity of the Obama campaign’s broadsides suggests a new willingness to play the role of aggressor, a welcome sign to Democrats who feared Obama’s recent slippage in national polls resulted from weak responses to McCain.
Presidential Campaign Turns Negative and It’s Not Even Labor Day
But the strategy also carries risks for a candidate whose appeal to some voters is tied to his assertion that he practices a higher-minded brand of politics.
Ironically, the first news of the day was a joint statement released by the campaigns shortly after 9 a.m. proclaiming that they had agreed to the rules governing the three traditional presidential debates that begin next month.
But agreement over the format of those more civil debates was quickly eclipsed by the salvos each campaign launched against the other.
The Democratic National Committee and state parties and officials jumped on the story about McCain’s homes, and the Obama campaign arranged for surrogates to appear at events in several states to highlight the issue.
All this started when McCain released an ad mockingly referring to Obama as “The One,” which features video clips of Obama saying that his victory in the Democratic primaries would be looked back upon as “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow” and of actor Charlton Heston, playing Moses in the film The Ten Commandments, parting the Red Sea. It also includes a quotation from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi in which she called Obama “a leader that God has blessed us with at this time.”
A nonprofit group, the American Issues Project, whose staff includes a former McCain aide, released an ad linking Obama to William Ayers, a leader of the Vietnam-era Weather Underground group that bombed government buildings, including the Capitol and the Pentagon.
Questions about the relationship between Obama and Ayers, a onetime political benefactor of Obama’s, have arisen anew because the library of the University of Illinois at Chicago, where Ayers works as a professor, declined a request from a reporter for the conservative National Review to see the records of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge. Ayers was a founder of the defunct education advocacy organization, and Obama once served as its chairman.
When the issue of his relationship to Ayers came up during the primaries, Obama dismissed his relationship with Ayers as casual. although in one of his debates with Hillary Clinton said it was an issue “that certainly the Republicans will be raising” in the general election campaign.
On Thursday, the Obama camp pointed to an item posted on the liberal Web site www.huffingtonpost.com suggesting that the ad may break campaign finance laws.
“We believe that this ad is not only filled with lies but blatantly illegal,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said in an e-mail to CQ Politics.
The campaign’s response to the Ayers charges linked them to previous McCain ads featuring grocery-store tabloid stars Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.
“Instead of invoking Paris, Britney and obscure sixties radicals, Sen. McCain should take the day off at one of his seven homes to consider whether his support for outsourcing, tax breaks for companies who ship jobs overseas and continued spending of $10 billion a month in Iraq is really putting ‘country first,’” Vietor said, taking a jab at McCain’s slogan. “To us, it just sounds like more of the same.”
Comments
The headline suggests that negative campaign is new to this season. I certainly would call comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears to be negative and lacking in substance. Pointing out the McCain isn't quite sure which homes his wife has bought or sold recently is a tad more substantial. McCain is busy trying to create an image as an average joe going to motorcycle rallies and suggesting his wife should take part in a raunchy beauty contest. Average Joe's do not have heiress wives who buy and sell houses in the same way the middle class might buy shoes.
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