The McCain Strategy: From Autobiography To Attack

Sam Stein
The Huffington Post

There is no doubt: in the past few weeks John McCain has made a conscious decision to run a negative, personalized campaign against Barack Obama. A campaign that was once focused on pushing the biographic attributes of its own candidate has now become almost uniquely intent on tearing down the opponent.

This reading is objective. In the past month, the McCain campaign has launched ten web and television advertisements. The first two spots were almost entirely devoted to McCain. The last eight contained only three brief mentions of the Arizona Republican. Indeed, of the 16 minutes and 35 seconds of space that these eight ads filled, 14 minutes and three seconds were spent focused on or discussing Barack Obama. The Illinois Democrat was criticized on everything from high gas prices and snubbing the troops, to egomania. There was, of course, an eight-minute web ad debunking Obama's consistency on the Iraq War. But even if that spot is removed from the equation, the Obama-to-McCain ratio of ad focus is still almost two-to-one.

(Continued here, with hot links.)