The Crossed Pond

There were two ads out from the McCain camp yesterday, one for TV misrepresenting Obama’s involvement with a sex-ed bill in the Illinois Senate that Obama supported but which went nowhere, and one cheap web ad relating to a comment about lipstick. Now, we can certainly disagree on how evil this was, particularly the sex-ed ad — Brad thinks it’s from the bottom of the barrel, wheras I am not as bothered — but I think that we’d both agree that the sex ad one was nastier, more damaging and generally less true, as can be seen at the rather elegant debunking by factcheck.org (I was actually going to make this post last night once they had their page up, as it contains all the information we need, but I am old and tired). This post is about priorities, then, rather than absolutes.

So, the first weird thing is that the news media yesterday was mostly focussed on the lipstick thing — certainly in terms of discussion, although they did play both ads again and again and again, ad nauseum — which, whilst being an amusing piece of campaign fluff, was hardly, you know, important; in fact, arguably neither story should have had so much airtime on a day that news was breaking of a serious scandal at the Interior Ministry. I watched MSNBC yesterday on-and-off from Morning Joe through to Gregory’s Race for the Whitehouse (boo, evil Tucker replacement, boo) and there was a hell of a lot more about the lipstick thing, with both camps producing surrogates and the network hunting up ’strategists’ and the like, whilst mostly ignoring the fact that it was at worst a sly joke, with occasional interludes of discussion about whether they should be having that discussion which tended, themselves, to devolve into discussions about the web ad. Now, if I was Obama, on reflection, I might have gone for a clear-eyed “that’s not what I meant” pseudo-apology rather than the snark and blaming the media (not without good reason, but it’s not a strategy likely to work well for Democrats), but in the end, it’s a nothing web ad designed to pull the attention of the media.

On the other hand, the sex-ed web ad is based around one fact, that the bill in question, designed to help protect kindergarten kids from sexual assault, contained the rather unfortunate phrase “comprehensive sex education” with a modifier that it should be ‘age appropriate’ (which, although it might be rather weak phrasing in itself, clearly illustrates that it’s not meant to be what it’s being made out to be, even without going into details of precisely what should be taught); the ad didn’t mention the modifier. The weirdish thing about the ad is that even with that aim in mind, of presenting it as a bill for ‘comprehensive sexual education for kindergarteners’, a claim that Allan Keyes tried in the 2004 race against Obama anyhow and which Obama dealt with pretty well in their debate and which is excerpted in that previously-mentioned factcheck.org page, the rest of the page shows that the ad contains other, unnecessary mistakes; it’s not a very competently executed hackjob even as these things go. In short, it’s easy to debunk and, although the media have paid some attention to it and played it a fair amount, the lipstick distraction and the immediate response from the Obama campaign:

“It is shameful and downright perverse for the McCain campaign to use a bill that was written to protect young children from sexual predators as a recycled and discredited political attack against a father of two young girls – a position that his friend Mitt Romney also holds. Last week, John McCain told Time magazine he couldn’t define what honor was. Now we know why.”

which they chose rather than an explanation of why the ad was so bad, have spread apart the events of many people seeing the ad and them hearing the debunking so that many of those people may hear the ad and not hear the debunking.

The other weird thing, although perhaps it contains an explanation (as Rojas pointed out last night in our secret IRC chat before he went to play ‘pub trivia’, which I think is some codeword for Spore designed to both throw me off the scent and also create the illusion that he has a social life, albeit one predicated on alcohol and his obsessive cribbing on whatever this year’s highschool debate topics are so that he is only welcome in social groupings of drunk people with desperate need of a geek with knowledge of statistics about cosmetics testing on animals) is that the sex ed ad is a TV ad, which might suggest that, as TV corporations that play these sorts of ads, they should be more interested in checking the facts, particularly as, as per the law, it has the “I approved this message” stock* McCain soundbite. Rojas’ point, that if they start checking the ads too closely, they might not get paid to run so many of them, is probably a fair one, however.

So, in an ideal world (my ideal world, at least), these sorts of ads would run, the media would pick them apart and then the offending campaign (McCain’s, in this case) would defend or retract them, or at least be put on the spot. That looks to me like a more reliable system than relying on common decency or the candidate factchecking their own ads (although one would hope that they have ad-producers they can trust), or the electorate themselves taking the time to check out the facts. Leaving aside our disagreements over how bad/evil/twisted the ad is, why was the lipstick thing, which was basically a debate over hidden intent, given so much coverage compared to an ad where the argument is much more about facts? The web ad is a web ad and is thus more easily and more appropriately dealt with, surely, on the web and amongst the blogs; the TV ad is for a wider audience, most/many of whom won’t be reading the blogs and things will work better if television news looks at it even as they broadcast it (although, to be fair, that does run the risk of blowing the thing wide open, as it did with the “Swift Boat Veterans For Truth” stuff, which grew from regional to national with the interest of the national press and which again they didn’t seem to be committed enough to debunking at the right time, which is to say, ‘early’).

I note in passing that Rush Limbaugh defends the McCain ad and that is most of the support I’ve found (not much on the Corner, for example). Perhaps the discussion will take place today, now that the lipstick story (lipstickgate? piggate?) must surely die.

*Or, at least, they all tend to sound the same to me.