We Must Reject the Slash and Burn Republican Strategies of Deceiful, Destructive Politics

After spending much of the summer searching for an effective line of attack against Senator Barack Obama, the Republicans began an aggressive campaign to define Mr. Obama as arrogant, out of touch and unprepared for the presidency. It smacked of terrible tactics used in the past to elect Republicans, recently George W. Bush. Senator John McCain, once the target of slash and burn politics from the Bush campaign, the same kind of message against Obama. His campaign, using the Karl Rove playbook, began a campaign to define Senator Barack Obama in negative terms.

The McCain campaign released a new advertisement suggesting — and not in a good way — that Mr. Obama was a celebrity along the lines of Britney Spears and Pris Hilton Republicans tried to portray Mr. Obama as a candidate who believed the race was all about him, relying on what Democrats said was a completely inaccurate quotation.

The Republican National Committee, which has aided and abetted all the travesties of the Bush-Cheney Presidency,began an anti-Obama Web site called “Audacity Watch,” a play on the title of Mr. Obama’s book “The Audacity of Hope.” And, in a concerted volley of television interviews, news releases and e-mail, campaign representatives attacked him on a wide range of issues, including tax policies and energy proposals.

The moves were the McCain campaign’s most full-throttled effort to define Mr. Obama negatively, on its own terms, by creating a narrative intended to turn the public off to an opponent. This is due in large part that McCain's campaign is now run by Bush people, trained in the Karl Rove style of attack and personal destruction, distracting people from real issues and focusing on what are often outright lies about another candidate's character and qualaifications.

Remember what the Rove-ites did to Al Gore and to John Kerry. In the case of Vice Presdient Gore, they made a brilliant man, a future Noble Prize winner, seem stupid and out of touch, a patent liar. With Senator Kerry, a bona fide war hero, they made him appear to be a liar and not worthy of his medals. Swift-boating became a term to describe such destructive politics.

In the July 31, 2008 edition of the New York Times, we read that the McCain campaign now has the imprint of the man once called "Bush's Brain", Karl Rove. Witness the fact that John McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of a number of Rove's former key assistants, members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of months have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on. Central to the latest McCain drive is an attempt to use against Mr. Obama the huge crowds and excitement he has drawn, including on his foreign trip to Europe, by promoting a view of him as more interested in attention and adulation than in solving the problems facing American families.

“I would say that it is beyond dispute that he has become the biggest celebrity in the world,” Mr. Schmidt said in a conference call with reporters in late July of this year. “The question that we are posing to the American people is this: ‘Is he ready to lead yet?’ And the answer to the question that we will offer to the American people is: ‘No he is not.’ ”

The intensity of the Rove type of attack drive — which has included some assertions from the McCain campaign that have been widely dismissed as misleading — went against public perceptions of McCain, who, in the past, has frequently spoken about the need for civility in politics. This just shows you something about McCain's own character -- he will sink as low as it takes to get elected, which is the Republican rule.

So McCain became “McNasty" and did not let a lie or two get in the way of promoting his candidacy by destroying Barack Obama. It is a big smokescreen, this style of politics, bringing distraction and disguise to the Repulican Party's failings of the last eight years. Thr truth is this -- John McCain will not bring change except in a familar old face to take the place of George W. Bush's face as the head of the same machine. It will be the same old politics, same failed policies.

Schmidt, whom Mr. McCain placed in charge of day-to-day operations in July, specialized during the 2004 campaign in seizing on opportunities — think windsurfing; seemingly contradictory votes on Iraq policy — to paint Mr. Kerry negatively.

Seeking similar openings, the campaign seized on Mr. Obama’s decision to skip a visit with wounded United States troops in Germany. (The McCain campaign said Mr. Obama canceled because he could not take the news media with him to the hospital, an assertion denied by the Obama campaign and undercut by the accounts of reporters.)

So, even when McCain tries to reposition himself as the same "maverick" of 2000, as he did at the Republican National Convention, do not be fooled! He really is the McBush candidate of 2008. He is running on the Bush model — strict adherence to the message of the day by the candidate combined with a relentless drive to define the opponent negatively, even if the accusations against the said candidate are half-truths or completely false.