I guess this whole idea of a new kind of Politics and not fighting a nasty campaign just went out the window…
Here’s a new video made by The American Issues Project: (H/T The Politico)
Ben Smith Writes:
A new conservative group has produced a television ad attacking Barack Obama for his relationship with former Weather Underground bomber Bill Ayers.
“How much do your really know about Barack Obama? What does he really believe?” asks the ad, which then cites the failed attack on the Capitol on 9/11, and links it to the Weather Underground attack on the Capitol decades earlier.
The group says it will spend $2.8 million airing the ad in Ohio and Michigan — which would be the largest single third-party expenditure this cycle.
“Why would Barack Obama be friends with someone who bombed the Capitol and is proud of it?” asks the narrator. “Do you know enough to elect Barack Obama?”
The group, the American Issues Project, is a 501(c)4 — which means it isn’t required to disclose its donors. According to a press release set to go out shortly, it’s the product of a coalition of conservative groups (Failor said his Iowans for Tax Relief is not among them). Its president is Ed Martin, a Missouri conservative. Another official, Ed Failor Jr., is a former McCain aide in Iowa who left after the campaign’s shakeup last summer.
The substance of the ad matches a recent upswing in the McCain campaign’s references to Ayers. The use of 9/11 imagery links Ayers, and Obama, to the American conflict Islamic terror, which is the subject of many viral e-mails attacking Obama.
The group’s spokesman, Christian Pinkston, called the suggestion that the group is making any link with Islam “unfair.”
“The idea here was to talk about the fact that his friends hate America, and that’s who he’s aligning himself with,” he said.
It’s spokesman, Christian Pinkston, is a former aide to presidential candidate Jack Kemp and went on to run the conservative group Empower America.
Pinkston says the ad will launch later this afternoon.
Of course the Obama Campaign is not taking this laying down at all, they issued a statement on the ad saying:
The fact that John McCain dispatched his paid consultant to launch
this despicable ad from a so-called ‘independent’ committee shows how
desperate he is to change the subject from his shocking disconnect with
the economic struggles of the American people. He knows that Barack
Obama has denounced the detestable crimes that Bill Ayers committed 40
years ago.Instead of invoking Paris, Britney and obscure ’60s radicals, Sen.
McCain should take the day off at one of his seven homes to consider
whether his support for outsourcing, tax breaks for companies who ship
jobs overseas and continued spending of $10 billion a month in Iraq is
really putting “country first.” To us, it sounds like just more of the
same. – Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor
How weak! I would have quickly produced a video that linked McCain to lobbyists and mentioned the supposed, never proven, so-called, affair that he had with a lobbyist. That would have shut them up, right away. But instead, they put out a weakly worded statement like that. Score one for McCain, I say. Plus, there’s no proof that McCain was linked to this group at all. So, again, the response was quite weak.
Look, If Obama is going to win this horse race, he had better learn to fight like pit bill and not a poodle. Because if he doesn’t Bulldog McCain is going to eat him alive.
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