the citizen-viewer

Not that we didn’t see it coming. McCain’s latest ad implies that Obama is some kind of child molester.

This is actually a reaction to Obama’s foray yesterday on education. The Dems can take solace that they at least drove the narrative a bit, but the truth is that this is just another day of Republicans on the low road.

The test for Obama in the primaries had been his ability to turn back the swiftboating character attacks of Clinton. Those now look like theological seminary hypotheticals in comparison to the knife thrusts of McCain-Palindrome.

It’s often said by liberals that their candidates have to fight back and fight hard. The trouble is that like Kerry, Obama is fighting back. Check every day’s message from the campaign and they are taking it t McCain-Palin. Kerry did too. So did Dukakis. We quickly forget, however, because they lost and because their rebuttals and counterattacks got lost in the media din which amplified the right’s talking points and ignored the Democrats’. There’s more to it than the media, but in order to stop the swiftboating it may be necessary for the press to stop being the McCain campaign’s accomplice.

The citizen-viewer adds:

The McCain-Palin campaign likely had that ad in the can, ready to broadcast the moment Obama made any kind of major speech on education. It’s based on an Alan Keyes attack that Obama spoke about in the past when talking to Planned Parenthood about the Illinois sex education bill.

The result is stories like this one in The Boston Globe. It glosses Obama’s speech and then describes McCain’s ad, quoting the line about sex ed for kindergarteners. Obama makes a policy speech, and the McCain campaign undercuts it by getting its response into the same news cycle.