McCain's Final and Dumbest Mistake, or a Misreport

I don't know if anyone has seen or heard about this report by David Kiley over at BusinessWeek. Hopefully, by now we've all seen or are aware of the negative ad run by the McCain campaign that falsely claimed that Obama canceled a visit with wounded troops in Germany last week because the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring reporters.

Kiley writes:

What the McCain campaign doesn’t want people to know, according to one GOP strategist I spoke with over the weekend, is that they had an ad script ready to go if Obama had visited the wounded troops saying that Obama was...wait for it...using wounded troops as campaign props.

After talking about it with my friend DB, a fellow political junkie, I think there are two salient points.

The first is that if this is true -- if this "ad script" exists, if McCain was even vaguely aware of this strategy, I think the race might be effectively over for him. Putting aside my personal feelings for a moment, and considering just the political ramifications, this plays extremely badly, and right into the worst possible narrative for John McCain at the worst possible time. It is the naked, absolute, height of political cynicism and negativity. I think Jon Q Voter will react viscerally and negatively toward it, and I don't know how you win them back. This is ethical bankruptcy in its most obvious form, and it's not even hard to explain or understand.

The second point is that I have to question the veracity of this strategist's claim. Everything I wrote in the previous paragraph is utterly predictable. Though I believe some campaigns are capable of actually doing something this diabolical (perhaps even McCain's), I simply have a hard time believing that this was anywhere approaching a formal strategy. I think it is more likely that someone from the campaign was making a barroom boast to the effect of, "we'll get him either way", or that this GOP strategist was simply conjecturing what they believe McCain camp would have done had Obama gone through with the troop visit. It's very difficult for me to swallow that this ever rose to the point of formal discussion of any kind, much less that preliminary work was undertaken to execute such a strategy.

I'm assuming we'll know in the coming days. Stay tuned.

Post Script: To quote Will Ferrell -- am I taking crazy pills or something? Though I've seen the story mentioned on a couple of lefty blogs, it hasn't gained any serious traction anywhere. How is this not a big deal? I don't pretend to have my finger perfectly on the pulse of American media or public, but I guess I seriously misjudged the inertia of this. If anyone has ideas about why this isn't an issue, or at least why the Obama campaign isn't indirectly making it one, I'd love to hear them.