Allahpundit finds the latest McCain web video — it’s not really an “ad” — strange, describing it as “a bit of “war is hell” thrown in to counter the left’s attempt to paint him as a ‘monger, but it’s two minutes too long and the rhetoric is so high-flown and stilted at points that not all of it registered on first, casual view. You really have to listen, which for most will require a second viewing, which ain’t in the offing for a spot that’s already pushing three minutes.”
It’s battlefield preparation, so to speak. Barack Obama seems like the more likely Democratic nominee, and Team McCain is defining the traits you want associated with their man when the general election showdown finally arrives — loyalty, honor, love of country and countrymen (note the emphasis of this in the video), courage, staying constant to a cause greater than himself in the most difficult circumstances imaginable.
Democrats often complain that Republicans “attack their patriotism.” But recent events, with nearly every viewer of cable news in the country having watched Jeremiah Wright scream, “God d*** America!” and “US of KKK A” from the pulpit multiple times, Americans would be forgiven for wondering just what Barack Obama thinks of his fellow Americans. They know Obama only distanced himself from Wright (and only halfway at that) when he became a threat to his political future. Remember the first paid ad of McCain’s general election effort, currently running in New Mexico:
What must a president believe about us? About America?
That she is worth protecting?
That liberty is priceless?
Our people, honorable?
McCain and his team would never be so crass as to come out and suggest, “Barack Obama doesn’t believe America is worth protecting, that our liberty is priceless, or that our people are honorable.” They don’t have to. They simply point out that with McCain, the answers to the above questions are crystal clear.
For Obama, the academic (as Michael Barone astutely notes)… well, if he really believed Americans were honorable, would he have established that close and lasting bond with Wright? Would his wife be suggesting she hasn’t been proud of the country for 25 years? Would he call wearing a flag pin a symbol of “false patriotism”?
UPDATE: A paragraph from Barone that puts it all in perspective:
“[Jacksonians] have, in historian David Hackett Fischer’s phrase, a notion of natural liberty: People should be allowed to do what they want, subject to the demands of honor. If someone infringes on that liberty, beware: The Jacksonian attitude is, “If you attack my family or my country, I’ll kill you.” And he (or she) means it. If you want to hear an eloquent version, listen to Sen. Zell Miller’s speech endorsing George W. Bush at the 2004 Republican National Convention. The academic who hears the Rev. Jeremiah Wright declaiming, “God damn America,” is not unnerved. He hears this sort of thing on campus all the time. The Jacksonian who watches the tape sees an enemy of everything he holds dear.