I know there are a few McCain supporters reading this, and I wonder if you could help me out on something. Can you find a single recent McCain ad that contains more true statements than false or deliberately misleading ones? Here’s the transcript of the latest McCain spot. Here’s a post discussing it. It accuses Obama and Biden of “dismissing Palin as good-looking” and saying “she was doing what she was told.” Biden did say Palin was better looking than he was—though hardly in a way that dismissed her. The phrase “what she was told” referred to some inaccuracies in some of Palin’s statement’s about Obama’s record. Rather than accuse her of lying, somebody from the campaign suggested she may have been told something different. The third statement, that the campaign said Palin was lying is probably more or less true, both in the sense that she was misleading people on a number of issues and in the sense that the Obama campaign called her on it. So, there were three claims, only one of which was true. The ad concluded with the admonition, “How disrespectful.”
Now, were I on McCain’s advertising team, I would say that the ad had accused Obama, a black man, of not showing proper deference to a white woman. But I haven’t mastered the trick of sleeping at night after promoting that kind of politics.
Additionally, if somebody comes across a single recent Obama ad that fails the minimal more truth than falsehood test, let me know. I haven’t seen any of his like this yet.
