Most of John McCain's recent attack ads have included someone saying a variation on "How [bad word]" in a weird tone of injured disgust/outrage. For instance:
How disrespectful... (from the "Lipstick" ad, which was pulled from YouTube)...
How dishonorable... How Dangerous ...
And the latest, How hypocritical...
I have to imagine that weird construction is polling out the roof since the McCain ad people keep using it. It hasn't been effective in the past because, well, no one believed that lipstick ad because it was such a wild exaggeration -- anyone who saw the full context of Obama's remarks realized he wasn't talking about Palin. The dishonorable/dangerous lineup didn't work either, again, because anyone who saw the full context of Obama's remarks on Afghanistan realized that he was making a perfectly innocuous statement.
But the new ad doesn't have any outright lies (that I'm aware of right now). It does point to some exaggerations the Obama camp has put in advertising, though none so outlandish or personal as McCain's. But it's going to be hard for McCain to have it two ways in the last three weeks of the campaign: He can't deride Obama as a hypocrite even as he launches increasingly heated attacks on his character, particulary because he telegraphed his move enough for Obama to make a decent prebuttal ad.
It was a mistake for the Obama campaign to run ads that had those exaggerations -- especially as many of McCain's actual policies are unpopular -- and it's showing now. Since many voters seem to assume that politicians are lying about most things, the outrage over McCain's falsehoods was confined to high-information voters and the media, but that's where it was most effective. McCain is not going to be able to reclaim the high road in this race, so the latest ad isn't going to be a game changer. How unfortunate.
--Tim Fernholz
