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Never Before

The week before the election, the Obama campaign ran a television commercial attacking the Republican candidate for vice president. To my knowledge, this had never been done before. ~Jack Kelly It’s probably not a good way to start a column endorsing Palin as a future presidential candidate by making a claim that shows that you […]

The week before the election, the Obama campaign ran a television commercial attacking the Republican candidate for vice president. To my knowledge, this had never been done before. ~Jack Kelly

It’s probably not a good way to start a column endorsing Palin as a future presidential candidate by making a claim that shows that you don’t know something that is central to your first claim.

In fact, since the dawn of televised campaign commercials, at least two campaigns have directly attacked the VP nominee or sought to use the VP candidate against the top of the ticket. Stevenson’s ’56 campaign ran a spot that asked whether you were “nervous about President Nixon” and put up a single word across the screen: “Nixon?” Scary stuff. Presumably, the audience was supposed to be very afraid of the possibility that Nixon might have to succeed Eisenhower (whose health was a minor issue in ’56). Like all of Stevenson’s other abysmal ads in both of his campaigns, this was a failure. As you would expect, there was also an anti-Quayle ad that laid it on thick. There may have been others, but they don’t leap to mind.

The key difference between this year’s ad criticizing the Palin choice and the others was that the Obama ad avoided the question of whether she was ready to be President. The Stevenson and Dukakis ads were intended to stoke fear and anxiety, and they were the products of losing, trailing campaigns. The Obama ad on Palin was much milder and came out very late in the campaign when Obama’s victory seemed assured. The Obama campaign set the bar much lower, and so delivered a more effective blow, by simply mocking McCain for having said that he needed someone with expertise in economic policy and then having chosen Palin. Perhaps because McCain’s age was already part of the debate, they did not need to remind anyone that there was an unusually good chance that McCain’s VP might have to serve as President. The campaign did not need to drive home the obvious that Palin was not exactly bursting with economic policy understanding, because anyone who had been following the election for the two months before that already knew this.

What Kelly missed, among other things, was that the Obama ad against Palin was aimed mainly at McCain’s judgement. Most Palin critics, myself included, started from the assumption that the Palin selection mattered because of what it told us about McCain, and what it told us was not flattering. The criticism of her misrepresentations of her record and her flubs on policy was as severe or pointed because there was an unusually good chance that she might have to become President if McCain were elected. Another round of criticism was directed against the slightly obsessive, blind devotion of an unqualified candidate for high office, because it seemed as if most conservatives had learned nothing from the Bush experience and were not interested in learning in more ways than one. Under normal circumstances, the VP selection might not have mattered at all, but it was because of what McCain purported to represent and because of his age and health that it took on more significance than most of these selections ever do.

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