by Frank James
Two new ads today from the Sen. John McCain's presidential campaign -- one for TV, the other for the web -- both mention Sen. Barack Obama's ambition using modifiers like "blind" and "vast" to describe it. (Are they saving "reckless" for closer to Election Day?)
Seems like it takes a fairly out-sized ambition for anyone to believe he or she should be president of the United States, the most powerful person in the world, in the first place. A huge ambition isn't so much a disqualifier for the job as a prerequisite.
Indeed, ambition is a quality Americans tend to admire. What parent doesn't want his or her child to be ambitious? What organization doesn't want to set more ambitious goals?
We are an ambitious nation which likes its ambitions large; vast even. Manifest Destiny. Putting humans on the Moon. Fielding the most powerful military the world has ever seen.
If nothing else, it's usually the lack of ambition, an ambition deficit, that Americans find abhorrent.
That's true especially when it comes to African-Americans. They're often criticized for allegedly not having enough ambition.
Now an African-American running for president has too much of it. What's that about?
There's something very Rovian about this. As most students of politics know, Karl Rove, President Bush's ace political strategist, delights in taking a candidate's strength and making it a liability. Just ask John Kerry about 2004. Or McCain about 2000.
So in this case Obama's ambition becomes not something parents should point to as a model for their children but a cause for concern, something to be found objectionable.
But clearly the McCain campaign ad makers believe voters have in their heads the notion of good and bad ambition and want voters to believe Obama has the latter, that like Cassius in Shakespeare's "Julius Caeser", he has that "lean and hungry look." Come to think of it, Obama certainly is skinny.
Maybe the charges of "vast" and "blind" ambition are also about something else. Perhaps Maybe it's another way to make the "Obama is inexperienced" argument.
As many observers, including conservatives, have noted, McCain largely weakened his ability to use the experience argument when he named Sarah Palin his running mate.
To say someone has "vast" ambition and to use the "political baptism at warp speed" quote from a newspaper sure seems like it could be an attempt to get that inexperience argument back on the table, to communicate in a different way to voters that Obama is a young man in too much of a hurry to be president.
There's a lot these ads to unpack, like the whole ACORN attack, a coordinated strategy launched by Republicans from local to national campaigns, and the mortgage crisis. We'll have to save those for future posts.
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Comments
What about mccain's ambition?
mccain has turned into a bitter joke.
Posted by: jerome | October 10, 2008 5:37 PM
So if Obama is too ambitious does that make McCain too desperate? LOL!
Had Mccain stood up to these Rovian methods, those same methods that tarnished his own career back in 2000, perhaps he would be ahead. But instead M Cain choses to scare, lie and decieve the American people. He will go down as the single most negative campaigner in American history! Way to go John!
Posted by: Scot S. Blakeley | October 10, 2008 5:43 PM
"Countrywide First" McCain strikes again. As Americans watch their lives savings evaporate because of over-leveraging of cds derivatives (thanks, Phil Gramm), McCain keeps flailing away with his personal attacks. As all these financial "wizards" on Wall St. were leveraging great financial "salads", complete with the occasional wilted toxic leaf, at a rate of 70-1. Now that's reckless.
Posted by: dt | October 10, 2008 6:41 PM
Has anyone in the McCain campaign looked at the headlines in this weeks' newspapers? If they want to spend these last days before the election making schoolyard taunts, well, let them.
Voters are not going to fall for this smear campaign. McCain is pathetic.
Posted by: athena | October 10, 2008 6:42 PM
You cannot run for the position of the "leader of the free world" and NOT be ambitious.
HELLO!?
Posted by: Jorge from Bloomington | October 10, 2008 7:07 PM
Even the conservatives are bailing:
Christopher Buckley, son of William F. Buckley, is backing Obama.
(CNN) — No, hell has not frozen over, but a Buckley is backing a Democrat for president.
Christopher Buckley, the son of the late conservative icon William F. Buckley, said Friday he's decided to back Barack Obama's White House bid, the first time in his life he will vote Democrat.
“It’s a good thing my dear old mum and pup [sic] are no longer alive. They’d cut off my allowance," Buckley, a columnist for the conservative National Review, wrote on the Web site The Daily Beast Friday.
Buckley, who praised McCain in a New York Times Op-Ed earlier this year and defended the Arizona senator's conservative credentials against wary talk-radio hosts, said McCain is no longer the “real” and “unconventional” man he once admired.
"This campaign has changed John McCain," Buckley wrote. "It has made him inauthentic. A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget 'by the end of my first term.' Who, really, believes that?
"Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis," Buckley added. "His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?"
But Buckley made clear he's not just voting against McCain, praising Obama for his "first-class temperament and first-class intellect.
"Obama has in him—I think, despite his sometimes airy-fairy 'We are the people we have been waiting for' silly rhetoric—the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader. He is, it seems clear enough, what the historical moment seems to be calling for," Buckley wrote.
Posted by: dt | October 10, 2008 7:26 PM
I believe the only legitmate basis for questioning Mr. Obama's relationship with William Ayers is the extent to which Mr. Obama agreed with Mr. Ayers' "small schools" movement (heavily funded by CAC), in which individual schools built around specific political themes push students to "confront issues of inequity, war, and violence." Did Mr. Obama agree with Mr. Ayers that teacher education programs should serve as "sites of resistance" to an oppressive system? Was this merely a means of distributing funds to allies such as ACORN? Was this the foundation of the Obama political organization? I have not seen the answers to these questions, which directly bear on ambition, ideology and accomplishment.
Posted by: Waiting for Answers | October 10, 2008 7:40 PM
Swampies, where do you get your racist tendencies. That ad was about "blind ambition." That's what describes someone who would use anyone, affiliate with anyone, enable anyone, in order to move ahead. It also happens to be the name of the book by John Dean - a rather caucasian fellow. He wrote a scathing self analysis that described how he sold his soul to get ahead in politics. As far as I see, the one who are stoking race in this race are Obama supporters - including his media base.
Posted by: Bemused | October 10, 2008 7:58 PM
"Obama is too ambitious"?
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by Frank James
Is this a Faux News press release or something?
Yep, no matter what happens, the Rethuglican party can always depend on good ol' Frank James to carry their water and give them back rubs.
John McCain is not man enough to own his crap. John McCain will not openly confront Obama with his smears and lies and innuendo. John McCain will not come out and talk about Ayers, he has to be asked. That is why he goes to places like Fox News, so he can be asked. What a coincidence.
John McCain is a coward.
John McCain would rather hide behind his wife and Sarah Palin than say it himself.
He would rather produce 2 minute ads that his campaign will never pay to air anywhere, and hope that the tire-swinging media will bring up the topic so he doesn’t have to do it himself.
John McCain just wants to throw crap out there, and "raise questions" about Obama, and hope his supporters connect the dots, because he is too much of a coward to directly push this toxic stew. McCain would rather hide behind right-wing bloggers, surrogates, and scummy websites (Frank James) staffed with wingnut welfare recipients like the NRO and the Weekly Standard.
John McCain had 90 minutes to bring this stuff up to Obama, to his face, and he took a pass.
John McCain is a liar and a coward.
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IH0xzsogzAk
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Posted by: Leo T. | October 10, 2008 8:05 PM
Albert Einstein (perhaps immodestly) offered his first wife the proceeds of his Nobel Prize as a divorce settlement.
The only problem was, he won it several years later.
That's confidence.
Or take Hitler (please). Did you know he sent congratulatory telegrams to the German competitors in the Winter Olympics of 1936, on the day BEFORE they were to compete? I have that from someone who was there.
Anyone who sits down to write his memoirs at the age of 32 (as Obama did) is not exactly lacking in self confidence.
Guess what? Neither was FDR. As a newly minted lawyer in a Wall Street law office he told his office mate he had a plan to follow his cousin's path to the Presidency (Theodore Roosevelt). At the age of 25.
FDR had a little detour, being paralyzed from the waist down, needing some rehab.
I think we need another president with the prescience or sense of destiny of FDR.
Come to think, that was one of FDR's greatest phrases--"rendezvous with destiny".
I've thought for a long time now that Barack has been destined to be president.
Which, if it happens, proves again that, as some know, the Lord works in mysterious ways, His wonders to perform.
Posted by: ornery | October 10, 2008 9:40 PM