Obama's Attack Ads

Jim Rutenberg writes in The New York Times that Barack Obama is going on the attack with sharper rhetoric on the stump along with negative television ads in local swing state markets while maintaining a positive tone in ads shown nationally.

The negative spots reflect the sharper tone Mr. Obama has struck in recent days on the stump as he heads into his party’s nominating convention in Denver next week, and seem to address the anxiety among some Democrats that Mr. Obama has not answered a volley of attacks by Mr. McCain with enough force.

“If you can go quietly negative, that’s what he’s done; I think the perception is that he’s still running the positive campaign,” said Evan Tracey, president of the Campaign Media Analysis Group of TNS Media Intelligence, which monitors political advertising. “It’s a pretty smart, high-low, good cop/bad cop strategy.”

These attacks come in response to similar tactics by John McCain and appear to stretch the truth as McCain's ads have.

But Mr. Obama’s advertising has increasingly included spots that, like those from Mr. McCain, have been called negative and misleading by independent media analysts like FactCheck.org, part of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania.

Until last week, the organization had mostly focused on misleading claims by Mr. McCain. He has consistently misrepresented the particulars of Mr. Obama’s tax and energy policies, claiming, for instance, that he will raise taxes on families making $42,000 a year — a nonbinding resolution he voted for would amount to a $15 increase on individuals with such income — and that Mr. Obama opposes nuclear energy (he does not).

“We certainly for a while were finding a lot more in McCain’s ads to complain about,” said Brooks Jackson, the director of FactCheck.org. “That pattern certainly has shifted a bit.”

McCain's multiple verbal gaffes, policy flip-flops (on taxes, immigration, climate change, offshore drilling and the Religious Right) and embrace of unpopular Bush administration policies (Iraq, taxes, health care) would seem to offer rich opportunities to attack him without stretching the truth.

--Ballard Burgher