KEY POINTS:
Senator Barack Obama has launched a sustained and sharply negative advertising campaign against his Republican opponent Senator John McCain, who has vaulted into the lead, according to an opinion poll yesterday.
The first black presidential nominee has repeatedly promised he would transcend the bickering of traditional politics. Trying to keep that pledge, but also the competitive edge, the Democrat senator is now running an uplifting national ad push while delivering fierce attacks on his opponent at the local level in key swing states.
The aggressive fightback comes after Republican underdog McCain opened up a five-point lead, according to a Zogby/Reuters poll, overturning the seven-point lead Obama had last month in the same poll.
The Republican senator now leads Obama among likely voters by 46 per cent to 41 per cent. The poll found voters believe McCain would be a stronger manager of America's declining economy, even though he admits to knowing little about economic issues.
That is a worrying reversal for the Obama campaign and follows unrelenting attacks by Republicans on his lack of wartime experience, his opposition to oil drilling offshore, and accusations that he is a "talker" rather than a "doer".
After his earlier ad comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, McCain's camp continued yesterday with a radio ad on Obama's spending plans. "Celebrities like to spend their millions," says the ad. "Barack Obama is no different. Only it's your money he wants to spend."
The Illinois senator built his campaign on a promise to transcend the bitter divisions of American politics and is maintaining this high-minded approach in most prime-time ads.
But in cities such as Philadelphia, Des Moines and Tampa, where undecided voters remain sceptical about Obama after a tough primary season, he has gone on the offensive.
A series of attack ads in the states that will be pivotal in the November 4 election seek to paint McCain as an elitist who is disconnected from the country's working-class voters.
Obama's tone reflects growing anxieties within his party that he has been damaged by a fusillade of attacks by McCain while Obama was holidaying in Hawaii. The political spotlight abruptly turned to McCain, who used Russia's invasion of Georgia to bolster his foreign policy credentials.
The latest poll was taken last week, while Obama was away. "There is no doubt the campaign to discredit Obama is paying off for McCain right now," the pollster John Zogby said.
Democrat activists want his campaign to draw voters' attention to McCain's "flip-flopping" on issues such as immigration, tax cuts for the wealthy, and torture.
Obama's negative campaigning has yet to turn personal, although his activists have urged him to do just that.
As the columnist Eric Alterman put it in the Nation: "He [McCain] conducted an adulterous affair before leaving his disabled wife, enjoys eight residences across the country, as well as corporate jets."
Instead, Mr Obama's aggressive ads have contrasted a statement McCain made about the economy: "We have had a pretty good, prosperous time with low unemployment", with ordinary people talking about their financial woes: "The prices of gas are up; the prices of milk are up," says one.
McCain made his remarks last January before the US economy went into a nosedive and has since runs ads saying: "We're worse off than we were four years ago."
Some media watchdogs, such as FactCheck.org, part of the Annenberg Public Policy Centre at the University of Pennsylvania, have branded the adverts misleading. "We certainly for a while were finding a lot more in McCain's ads to complain about," said centre director Brooks Jackson. "That pattern certainly has shifted a bit."
Obama has three polling organisations working for him, all of which are picking up voters' concerns about the economy. In response, he has blanketed at least five cities and large urban areas with attacks on McCain.
"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," Evan Tracey, of TNS Media Intelligence, told the New York Times. "It's a pretty smart, high-low, good cop/bad cop strategy."
Obama is also attacking his opponent's grasp of economics with a mock book, Economics, by John McCain: "Support George Bush 95 per cent of the time; keep spending US$10 billion a month for the war in Iraq."
Last Monday, the Obama campaign spent nearly US$400,000 ($560,000) running the two negative ads more than 600 times. Some two-thirds of all his commercials on that day were negative, compared with 85 per cent of McCain's. Obama spent US$48 million on ads in June and July compared with US$37 million by McCain.
- INDEPENDENT
