Last night, I realized that if David Petraeus had been named General David Smith or Jones, the MoveOn.org ad would have asked, “Can We Trust Gen. Jones?” or “Will Gen. Smith Tell the Truth?” But because his last name rhymes with “Betray-Us”, the MoveOn ad makes couldn’t resist the temptation. If his name had been General David Freason, we can imagine their preferred term…

I talked to Patrick Hynes, a McCain communication strategist with lengthy experience in political advertising, for his thoughts on the MoveOn.org ad’s impact: “When I saw the ad, I thought, ‘this is just an excuse to put the words ‘Betray Us’ in the headline.’ No one thinks this guy is a bad guy. I see no upside to that ad. The odd thing is that newspaper ads don’t drive messages. They can support a message, and you may hit some opinion influencers, but if you really wanted to burn a message into people, you would run television ads about him saying he’s a Bush crony. I think MoveOn just wanted to smear him, and to put a ‘cute’ rhyme in the headline. And when they say, ‘cooking the books,’ it seems to me to be coming very close to libel. I’m not a lawyer, and I know it’s difficult to prove libel against a public figure, but it had to come close to being actionable – it literally questioned his patriotism.”

When asked whether the ad stepped on Democratic lawmakers’ preferred message yesterday, Hynes responded, “This is bad news for [Democratic lawmakers], to some degree some might view it as a gift, in that they can denounce the ad and look moderate. But MoveOn and the Democratic Party are just so co-branded, that I’m not sure any distancing would burn through. There’s just no plausible deniability, and the RNC and Republican Senatorial committee were very good at getting out their response. You’re seeing state parties demand every Democratic member of Congress return any donations they have received from MoveOn.”

Considering the impact of the op-ed by O’Hanlon and Pollack a few weeks ago, it will be striking if the two biggest messages influencing the Iraq debate in opposition to the ‘pull all the troops out now’ crowd both came in the pages of the New York Times.