Business Week: The McCain campaign had adopted an ad strategy that has been dubbed "desperate" by Time Magazine political columnist Joe Klein. Klein
July 30, 2008

Business Week:

The McCain campaign had adopted an ad strategy that has been dubbed "desperate" by Time Magazine political columnist Joe Klein. Klein was writing in response to this latest ad from McCain's new ad/communications honcho Steve Schmidt.

Klein writes that a candidate air (this) ad only if: "1. You're desperate. 2. Your Middle East policy has been superseded by events and abandoned by your allies. 3. You apparently have nothing substantive to say about America's future role in the region and the world."[..]

This ad asserts a McCain campaign talking-point that Obama wouldn't make time for wounded troops unless cameras were allowed to follow him, but did make time to work out at a gym. This, of course, is a lie. It's a blatant lie. Steve Schmidt, a disciple of Karl Rove's who worked on George W. Bush's 2004 ad/communications effort, though, is playing the Rovian playbook that says that it doesn't matter if it's true as long as your target audience (non-college educated white working class voters) won't bother to find out the actual truth, and believe that it "sounds like it might be a true."

For the second time in a week the non-partisan www.factcheck.org takes McCain to task for a false ad [false, btw, is another word for lie].[..]

What the McCain campaign doesn't want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props. So, no matter which way Obama turned, McCain had an Obama bashing ad ready to launch. I guess that's political hardball. But another word for it is the one word that most politicians are loathe to use about their opponents-a lie.

This is what some people are calling the Hannity strategy. Right wing nut-muffin Sean Hannity employs a slick strategy of repeating canards very quickly over and over, day in and day out, which aren't challenged by his TV co-host Alan Colmes or by any of his radio listeners. By relentlessly repeating falsehoods day after day, the theory goes, it becomes embedded in the media.

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