Dos Caras
It seems that the candidates save some of their most dishonest ads for Spanish-speaking audiences. The first one I noticed was McCain attempting to paint Obama as someone with no interest in Latin America whatever, despite the fact that Obama had already given a policy speech on Latin America earlier in the year, and then there have been Obama’s ads trying to incite Latinos against McCain, with whom Obama has essentially zero disagreements on immigration policy, with false and dishonest representations of both McCain and critics of illegal immigration. These ads attempt to make McCain out to be some hard-line restrictionist who doesn’t like Mexicans, which is so comically inaccurate that one might almost think that Obama’s people were auditioning for jobs at The Onion. On top of that, the latest ad attempts to twist things Limbaugh said and then impute them to McCain, the candidate whom Limbaugh once pronounced as the doom of the Republican Party if he were nominated (Limbaugh seems to have gotten over his concerns). This is on par with Obama’s insinuations that McCain will engage in race-baiting to compensate for his lack of ideas. This misunderstands McCain completely–he glories in his lack of ideas and takes pride in his tired platitudes. This latest Obama attack is right down there with his lame claims that McCain is responsible for undefined “allies” who talk about Obama’s “Muslim connections,” when this is simply not true. To my surprise, despite a fairly concerted effort to pin race-baiting on McCain earlier this year, the media and the Obama campaign have largely abandoned that accusation and redoubled their focus on McCain’s dishonesty.
If challenged on any of this, I suppose Obama can also use the McCain defense that the media reward trashy attack ads and ignore high-road tactics, but lies are lies and Obama has been churning out some amazing whoppers lately.
Update: I had forgotten that McCain was already running his own dishonest Spanish-language ad on Obama’s immigration position, which McCain absurdly tries to portray as opposed to amnesty, er, the “road to citizenship” and thus makes explicit his own continued support for the same. So I suppose you can call Obama’s latest an example of retaliatory lying.
The best “dos caras” argument would be that, as Daniel points out, McCain is at odds with his party which is widely perceived by many Hispanics as “having a problem with brown people”. So which is it, the red meat we saw in the primaries with all those ferocious nativists or McCain, el amigo de los latinos?
That is the contradiction that Obama should point to, although it confuses and blurs the difference between candidate and party.
McCain may have taken a reasonable position on immigration previously but I have a feeling he’ll succumb to the build a wall crew if he wins.
As a person who goes to Mexico often I wish we could help our neighbors become the kind of place it’s citizens aren’t trying to escape.
Has everyone lost their minds? Didn’t McCain completely repudiate his previous stance on immigration during the primaries? Didn’t he come out against his own immigration plan, and say that he would never give amnesty to illegals? Isn’t this shit all on the record? Are we simply saying that McCain was lying during the primaries, that he meant absolutely nothing that he said then, and that now that he’s the candidate, we can just presume that as President he will do exactly the opposite of what his position on immigration has been since the primaries, and the opposite of the platform he is now running on? What kind of insanity is this? How can we believe anything this guy says, or predict with any certainty what he would do. If McCain will freely lie and change his position on immigration however the political winds suit him, why can’t Obama criticize him for the position he has actually taken, and hold him to it? Are we supposed to condemn Obama for not understanding that McCain is always lying, and therefore shouldn’t be criticized for the stance on immigration that he’s taken since the primaries, since McCain is presumed to have lied then and is lying now? My head is about to explode.
I’m reminded of Kerry’s speech during the convention when he compared Senator McCain with candidate McCain.
‘Candidate McCain doesn’t support a bill written by Senator McCain, talk about being for it before you were against it.’
Isn’t it odd that you finally meet a politician after his upward rise has stopped completely.
BTW I’ve yet to meet someone who voted against Kerry for the ‘for it before I was against it’ remark who can explain senate rules and how he got two votes. They were given a reason to run from Kerry and that’s what they were looking for so they laugh and pull a lever and 4 years later here we are and those same clowns won’t vote for Obama because they don’t trust him yet can’t explain why. We need a test to determine if you are competent to vote. Actually I hate that idea but low information voters give me the vapors.
Sorry for the rant.
It would be fair to hit McCain on his pandering in the primaries, but no restrictionist who takes this issue seriously believes for a minute that McCain has given up on amnesty, much less that he agrees with any anti-Mexican rhetoric (which, as it happens, distorted what Limbaugh said). Yes, he now says that he “got the message” when he’s talking to Republican audiences and emphasizes border security more than he used to, but his position on what to do after securing the borders hasn’t changed a bit. This year he has told Latino audiences that he wants “comprehensive” reform and the “pathway to citizenship” and all the rest, so the only people who are being conned are McCain’s restrictionist voters. The people who ought to be worried about any McCain two-facedness are conservatives, since McCain has certainly not repudiated his old position. That doesn’t make the Obama ad true or fair.
Besides, it is tactically foolish, since he is already winning Latinos at least 70-30 and immigration is his greatest weakness among conservative voters. If Obama reminded the public that McCain agrees with him on immigration, that might do more damage to his opponent than a dozen negative ads. As it is, Obama has now rallied conservatives around McCain concerning an issue where they normally hate him.
I’m not sure why we should assume that McCain will ever actually go through with his original, and now disavowed, immigration proposal, since every single position he has taken over the last year shows him to be cravenly seeking the support of the conservative base of the GOP. THe idea that if he wins, that he will suddenly flip again and alienate the base that made his win possible (Palin and all) is pretty much nuts. McCain knows who he has sold his soul to, and what the price is. He’s clearly willing to pay that price to become President, and once President, he know who he must please to keep his support. The idea that McCain has some idealistic commitment to immigration is crazy. He originally backed this kind of thing purely as political posturing to differentiate himself from the rest of the GOP, to be a “maverick”, to appeal to Democrats, and sold himself out on it as soon as it became clear it was an obstacle to the Presidency.
Right now, McCain is benefitting from a perception on the left that he’s actually in favor of liberal immigration reform, and from the right that he’s opposed to it. One decent argument from Kaus over this ad is that it represents Obama’s attempt to bait McCain into declaring his true position on immigration, which no matter where it lies is bound to piss off at least half the electorate who thought he was on their side.