Soccer Dad

Looking for innuendo in all the wrong places

The other day the New York Times distanced itself from the Republican it endorsed a half year ago in the New York primary when it criticized Republican Sen. John McCain for running the "Low Road Express:"

In recent weeks, Mr. McCain has been waving the flag of fear (Senator Barack Obama wants to "lose" in Iraq), and issuing attacks that are sophomoric (suggesting that Mr. Obama is a socialist) and false (the presumptive Democratic nominee turned his back on wounded soldiers).

To what degree these attacks or criticism were unfair, I'm not going to address, but I noticed hypocrisy in this editorial. I sent my thoughts to James Taranto who apparently agreed and noted in his inimitable way:

This is the same New York Times that in February published an unsubstantiated story suggesting that McCain had had an affair with a lobbyist. The difference is that whereas McCain is engaging in partisan politics, the Times was doing journalism. It seems the paper's standard for the latter is considerably lower than for the former.

Q and O noted the hypocrisy plus desperation and advised:

So despite the irony of the paper that gave us "General Betray-us" ad and ran with the McCain affair story lecturing anyone about "low-roads", it is apparent that something has stirred up the Times fear-factor enough to have it attempt to change the McCain campaign's tactics. Maybe it is the recent polls which show McCain closing the race up again. Whatever it is, the McCain camp ought to adopt an operating principle for the rest of the election cycle which says, "whatever the New York Times suggests we do, we will do the opposite".

Then came the "Celebrity" ad. I've never seen it. But the commentary about it has been revealing.

Whether or not it was an effective ad is being debated on the Republican side. But the Democrats see racism inherent in the ad. One rather inspired commentator sees the Republicans using Nazi imagery.

The general charge about McCain running a racist campaign was one that Jake Tapper rejected:

I've seen racism in campaigns before -- I've seen it against Obama in this campaign (more from Democrats than Republicans, at this point, I might add) and I've seen it against McCain in South Carolina in 2000, when his adopted Bangladeshi daughter Bridget was alleged, by the charming friends and allies of then-Gov. George W. Bush, to have been a McCain love-child with an African-American woman.

But the pro-Obama crown isn't mollified and the editors of the New York Times repeated a meme that's getting traction on the Left. (via memeorandum)

The presumptive Republican nominee has embarked on a bare-knuckled barrage of negative advertising aimed at belittling Mr. Obama. The most recent ad compares the presumptive Democratic nominee for president to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton -- suggesting to voters that he's nothing more than a bubble-headed, publicity-seeking celebrity.

The ad gave us an uneasy feeling that the McCain campaign was starting up the same sort of racially tinged attack on Mr. Obama that Republican operatives, some of whom work for Mr. McCain now, ran against Harold Ford, a black candidate for Senate in Tennessee in 2006. That assault, too, began with videos juxtaposing Mr. Ford with young, white women.

Without agreeing to the adjectives, I have little to complain about the first paragraph. The point of the ad was to depict Sen. Obama as, shall we say, uncomplicated. Toward that end the ad sought to compare Obama to others who are famous as celebrities but not necessarily experts on world affairs. Obviously a Senator and former law professor possesses a level of sophistication that vacuous celebrities don't have; but that doesn't mean that he has the relevant experience. Sen. Obama isn't the presumptive Democratic nominee because of a long and distinguished legislative career; he's the nominee because he's an extremely gifted orator. He's the nominee because of his celebrity.

Not to kick a dead horse but there's a difference between a comparison and a veiled accusation. What the NYT published back in February about John McCain and a white woman was a veiled (and poorly sourced) accusation. However one feels about the "Celebrity" commercial it wasn't an accusation. It was a comparison. One would hope that people who make their living writing could tell the difference between the two. Especially when, in the case of the Times, it shed all pretense of objectivity on its news pages when it attempted to create a McCain scandal a half year ago.

So the high dudgeon of the editors now comes across as utterly insincere. Alas there are those who are even more unhinged.

Noam Schreiber of The New Republic claims that the McCain campaign is trying to make Sen. Obama look like a Nazi or as LGF cleverly puts it, TNR play the Godwin card.

It's a charge that Ross Douthat rebuts brilliantly:

If your candidate is going to stage enormous rallies in front of tens of thousands of chanting Germans (with monuments to Prussian military might in the background) in the middle of his Presidential campaign, it isn't the GOP's fault if the footage comes out looking a little like Hitler at Nuremberg.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, liberals would do well stop digging so deep looking for sources of outrage.

Posted by SoccerDad at August 1, 2008 6:15 AM | TrackBack