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New McCain Ad Hits Obama On War

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The New York Times

Published: July 20, 2008

This advertisement for Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was introduced on Friday and is running on national cable networks and on television stations in 11 battleground states, including Pennsylvania and Ohio.

PRODUCER: McCain Media Team

THE SCRIPT: A man announces, "Barack Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan. He hasn't been to Iraq in years, he voted against funding our troops - positions that helped him win his nomination. Now Obama is changing to help himself become president. John McCain has always supported our troops and the surge that's working. McCain: Country first." McCain says, "I'm John McCain, and I approve this message."

ON THE SCREEN: The advertisement opens on a cutout photograph of Obama holding a microphone and grinning as the screen behind him changes from a map of Afghanistan to a map of Iraq. The background flashes negative messages - "Hasn't Been to Iraq in Years," "Against Troop Funding" - and opinionated newspaper headlines about him, including one that reads: "Obama, the Candidate of 'Change My Mind.'" After another photograph of Obama grinning, the advertisement switches to still photos of McCain in front of flags, ending with a new slogan for him, "Country First."

ACCURACY: McCain's regular assertion that Obama has not held hearings on Afghanistan during his chairmanship of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee's subcommittee on European affairs is accurate.

And Obama has not tended closely to his duties as chairman of that subcommittee, focusing instead on his presidential campaign. But Sen. Joseph R. Biden Jr., D-Del., the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, and a spokesman for his Republican predecessor as chairman, Sen. Richard G. Lugar of Indiana, have called the charge that he was negligent unfair, since such hearings have been held at the committee level. Obama missed two of the three hearings that the committee held in the last two years.

But ABC News reported in the past week that McCain missed all six hearings on Afghanistan that were held by the Senate Armed Services Committee, of which he is a member, during the same time period.

Obama's trip to Iraq will be his second; he went there in 2006. Obama has voted for various bills to finance troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, including a bill that President Bush vetoed in 2007 because it included mandates to withdraw troops from Iraq. Obama, who opposed the increase in troops, voted against the compromise bill to pay for the war that is cited in this advertisement and did not include those mandates, arguing that he did not want to give Bush "a blank check." He has followed a similar voting pattern since.

SCORECARD: This is McCain's first confrontational advertisement that directly names Obama. With it, he is meeting his strategic imperative to insert himself into the political dialogue while Obama is overseas with a huge contingent of reporters and television correspondents who promise to give him the lion's share of news coverage in the coming days.

The accusation that Obama is against financing the troops is of the sort that proved damaging to Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the Democratic presidential candidate in 2004. Yet that was a different time, and whether this charge will hurt Obama, in a year when the American presence in Iraq is unpopular in spite of improved conditions, remains to be seen.

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