DENVER—So much for a rest from negative politics.
Barack Obama and John McCain have launched no less than a half-dozen hard-hitting ads against each other in two days.
Obama and his Democrats aren’t going to be shy about going after the GOP nominee-in-waiting during their four-day convention. And McCain and his Republicans are staying on the attack against their Democratic foe.
Look for the tables to turn next week at the GOP convention in St. Paul, Minn.
“Do we really want four more years of the same old tune?” says a new musical Obama commercial showing pictures of McCain and President Bush as it paints the Republican contender as a dolt on the economy.
A McCain advertisement, in turn, features clips of Hillary Rodham Clinton stoking doubts about Obama during the Democratic primary by saying: “you never hear the specifics” and “we still don’t have a lot of answers about Senator Obama.”
All this coming from two White House hopefuls who once vowed to run respectful, positive campaigns.
The negativity flowing from both sides is relentless, so much so that it’s difficult to remember the years when candidates used to refrain from campaigning during their opponent’s convention week. There’s no such holiday from the bitter back-and-forth in 2008.
Perhaps the biggest reason: It’s a very close race, and both candidates have enormous challenges to overcome. Thus, each seems to be trying hard to paint the other as unacceptable in voters’ minds.
Obama, 47, is a first-term Illinois senator with a foreign-sounding name who would be the country’s first black president. He offers “change” but hasn’t fully described exactly what that means and hasn’t managed to reassure skeptics who have trouble picturing him in the White House.
McCain, 72 this week, is a four-term Arizona senator who is aligned with the unpopular Bush on Iraq and the economy as voters hunger for change after eight years of a Republican at the helm. Compounding his woes, the country is at war abroad and facing economic troubles at home.
“Neither one of them can win, but both of them can make the other lose,” said Alex Castellanos, a Republican strategist and veteran of several presidential campaigns.
Said Bill Carrick, a Democratic operative who also has decades of experience in White House races: “I just don’t see how there’s going to be any stand down by either one of them that’s going to turn the campaign in another direction.”
Obama is casting McCain as a Bush clone and, perhaps, even questioning his fitness, at his advanced age, to be president.
“When asked how many houses he owns, McCain lost track. He couldn’t remember,” said a TV ad Obama rolled out last week as he sought to take advantage of the Republican’s fumble.
McCain is tagging Obama as an unprepared liberal, and, certainly stoking concerns about the Democrat’s associations with questionable characters.
In response to Obama’s housing ad, McCain’s campaign highlighted scandal-scarred Chicago businessman Antoin “Tony” Rezko’s role in a questionable land deal with Obama and said: “Now, he’s a convicted felon, facing jail. That’s a housing problem.”
Clearly, their promises to run aboveboard campaigns are behind them, as polls show the contest tightening nationally and in key states with 10 weeks left to go.
Both sides are pounding the snot out of each other on an hourly basis in TV ads, through surrogates and in dueling attack e-mails.
In truth, Obama and McCain have reveled in contrasting themselves with one another since wrapping up their respective nominations.
But the negativity spiked earlier this month, as McCain unleashed a line of attack that mocked Obama as nothing more than a lightweight celebrity. The approach struck a chord and contributed in part to McCain closing in on Obama in opinion polls.
Obama’s campaign, in turn, stepped up its attacks as Democrats privately and publicly fretted over whether their nominee-to-be was aggressive enough in responding.
Wary Democrats recall 2004, when Democrat John Kerry was slow to counter a GOP-aligned group questioning his patriotism. With distaste, they also remember Kerry’s requirement that speakers at his convention in Boston refrain from attacking Bush—only to watch Republicans assail the Democratic nominee in New York at their own gathering a few weeks later.
Obama’s campaign doesn’t want to make the same mistake this week.
“We’re not going to shy away from making the contrast. People are making a choice. We need to make clear what that choice is,” top Obama strategist David Axelrod told ABC’s “This Week.” “We’re going to do it in a constructive way, but we’re going to lay it out very, very clearly.”
McCain’s campaign, for its part, is counter-punching with a so-called “rapid response” operation set up in downtown Denver as the GOP seeks to force its way into the campaign conversation.
A reversal in roles next week at the GOP convention is a certainty.
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EDITOR’S NOTE—Liz Sidoti covers the presidential campaign for The Associated Press and has covered national politics since 2003.
