Ad Hawk: Obama Plays the Age Card. Again.

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Can you feel the cognitive dissonance tonight?

According to Barack Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, this was a historic day--"the first day," in his words, "of the rest of the campaign." In a memo sent to reporters this morning heralding the arrival of this hopeful new age--"at least the second time the Obama campaign has decreed such a new beginning, perhaps even the third," as ABC News's Jake Tapper notes--Plouffe informs us that Chicago "will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain’s attacks and ... take the fight to him ... on the big issues that matter to the American people." This afternoon in Dover, N.H., Obama himself made precisely the same point in response to a voter's question. "I can guarantee you that we are going to be hitting back hard," Obama said. "We are hitting back on the issues that matter to families."

Like, for example, McCain's doddering old-fogey-ness?

Apparently, yes. While Obama was transmitting his high-minded "hit back hard on the issues that matter" message from the stump in Dover, his ad department was sinking a little lower. Released this morning, "Still" ostensibly "details why John McCain would just be another out-of-touch president offering more of the same." But it's really about why old John McCain would just be another old out of touch president offering more of the same old. The spot opens with a shot of the word "1982"--the year McCain was elected to Congress--followed by a montage of images from that prehistoric era: a disco ball, a cinder-block cell phone, a record player, an early PC, a Rubik's Cube. "Things have changed in the last 26 years, but McCain hasn't," the announcer says. "He admits he still doesn't know how to use a computer. Can't send an e-mail." Cue the clip of McCain puttering around in a golf cart with 84-year-old former president George H.W. Bush.

While the underlying message of "Still" is certainly relevant--i.e., whether McCain represents "more of the same"--the way Team Obama has chosen to deliver that message is misleading. (Nevermind the fact that they're preaching to the choir--younger, techier folks who already support Obama--and alienating the older, less-wired voters they still need to win over.) Take the computer thing. Last year, McCain famously admitted that he's "a [computer] illiterate [who] has to rely on my wife for all of the assistance I can get." That's where "Still" gets its quote. More recently, however, McCain updated his status--pun intended--in an interview with the New York Times. "I'm learning to get online myself," he said. "I'm becoming computer literate to the point where I can get the information that I need." In July, aide Brooke Buchanan testified to McCain's growing competence. "He's fully capable of browsing the Internet and checking web sites," she said. "He has a Mac and uses it several times a week." If McCain's previous lack of curiosity on the subject (and the attendant symbolism) rubs you the wrong way, fine. I happen to believe that it's kind of inconsequential--as I've written before. Either way, it's simply inaccurate to claim, as Obama does, that McCain "still" doesn't know how to use a computer.

Even worse is the line "can't send an email." That factoid--attributed in the ad to a July 13, 2008, New York Times article--seems to be completely fabricated. What McCain said at the time was “I don’t e-mail." Can't and don't, of course, are two very different verbs--especially for a U.S. senator. One connotes inability; the other connotes inaction. When aides are responding to your messages and keeping your calendar, the incentive to use Outlook sort of disappears. As McCain himself put it in July, "I've never felt the particular need." To conclude that McCain can't click the SEND button simply because he doesn't--and then to mock him for his imbecility--is a low blow.

Implying that McCain is too ancient to occupy the Oval Office is not a new part of the Obama playbook. The Illinois senator has long praised McCain for his "half century of service," and his surrogates regularly attach the adjective "confused" to their Republican rival. Last month, Chicago released an ad claiming that McCain had "lost track" and "couldn't remember" "how many houses he has"--a result, said a spokesman, of "how out of touch all of John McCain’s years in Washington have made him" (emphasis mine). I'm not saying that "Still" is as misleading as McCain's commercials from earlier this week. It's not. Nor am I saying that Obama's isn't allowed to "hit" the Arizona senator "hard" for being an economically incompetent Bush clone, as he does in the second half of the ad. Given Team McCain's underhanded tactics, Obama has a right to fight back. But when he starts insinuating that McCain is not just out of touch but senile--and stretches the facts to do it--then he's drifted far enough from "the issues that matter to families" to start sounding hypocritical.  

UPDATE, Sept. 13: Perhaps McCain "can't" email after all. From the Boston Globe, circa 2000:

McCain gets emotional at the mention of military families needing food stamps or veterans lacking health care. The outrage comes from inside: McCain’s severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, typing on a keyboard, or tying his shoes. Friends marvel at McCain’s encyclopedic knowledge of sports. He’s an avid fan - Ted Williams is his hero - but he can’t raise his arm above his shoulder to throw a baseball.

And from Forbes Magazine around the same time:

In certain ways, McCain was a natural Web candidate. Chairman of the Senate Telecommunications Subcommittee and regarded as the U.S. Senate’s savviest technologist, McCain is an inveterate devotee of email. His nightly ritual is to read his email together with his wife, Cindy. The injuries he incurred as a Vietnam POW make it painful for McCain to type. Instead, he dictates responses that his wife types on a laptop. “She’s a whiz on the keyboard, and I’m so laborious,” McCain admits.

Either way, it's not fair to assume that McCain can't acquire--or doesn't already have, as the Forbes excerpt indicates--a broad understanding of technology issues without being a regular emailer. Using the Internet doesn't really contribute to your understanding of tech-related public policy, and legislators (and presidents) regularly make laws about stuff they haven't experienced firsthand (like farming or immigration). I agree with conservative columnist Jonah Goldberg on this one, actually: it's stupid for the Obama campaign to imply "that McCain is unqualified to be president because he can’t grasp cyber-security issues based on the fact he has never sent an email when the McCain campaign can just as easily say Obama can’t understand first order national security issues because he’s never fired a rife, flown a plane, commanded men in battle, or faced an enemy." Of course, I don't think Chicago's goal is that sophisticated. They're happy to imply that McCain is old and call it a day.