McCain’s Accidental Honesty

Earlier today I was checking out a blog – Politics 2000 by Tyson Chaney – after he bought an Entrecard spot on my blog.  While reading his post titled Expect No Electoral Change with an Obama-Biden Ticket, I noticed a Google driven ad right below the post title.

I normally wouldn’t have clicked an ad like that, but having just written in the BC political forums about my disappointment in the McCain campaigns focus on everything except John McCain I decided that an invitation to “Learn More About John McCain” was worth accepting.  The link in the ad – after passing through Google’s click tracking system – points to http://www.johnmccain.com/videolanding/biden1.htm?sid=google&t=obama-biden.

As much as I dislike websites that send you into a video immediately I let it play out.  Twice. Interestingly, it didn’t tell anything about McCain directly.

The video featured Hillary Clinton,

Barack Obama,

Antoin Rezko, (Be sure to check out The RNC’s Secret Rezko Connection where we learn that Rezko, while an Obama supporter, also donated thousands of dollars to George W. Bush during the 2000 and 2004 elections.)

and Joseph Biden.

You have to sit through the whole ad and listen to the McCain campaign try to spin everything that Clinton or Biden said about Obama throughout the Primary season before you finally get to learn about McCain.  At the very end you see this:

John McCain’s disembodied head shows up to tell you that he is John McCain and he approved the message.

To be fair, you can click on past the video to get to the McCain website proper – to the homepage with the somewhat creepy URL of http://www.johnmccain.com/HomeLogged.aspx.

At first I was annoyed that once again, learning about McCain has come to mean learning about everyone involved in this campaign except for John McCain.  After I thouht about it, I realize that inadvertently, the campaign had done as promised and if people are paying attention they will indeed learn a lot about McCain.

The lesson to be learned is that John McCain, having sat out eight votes for subsidies for the wind farms he features in so many ads, has nothing new to offer Americans.  He has allowed his campaign staff to build an entirely negative campaign around the tearing down ideas that even his own donors and supporters say are good idea.

The McCain campaign tried to make obama look like a fool for suggesting that Americans should maintain the proper air pressure levels in their car tires to conserve fuel.  They did their very best to make it appear that making sure car tire inflation levels are right is his entire energy policy.  Most Americans I know, including many of my Republican friends, shook their heads and wondered exactly how stupid the McCain camp thinks Americans are.

While McCain’s campaign was deriding Obama’s suggestion, one of the American Petroleum Institute’s websites – EnergyTomorrow.org includes Obama’s tip to improve gas mileage in the prominent #2 spot on their list of ways to save fuel.

Home > Oil & Gas 101 > Tips for Living > Fuel Saving Tips

These simple facts can help you save fuel and get more miles out of each tank of gas:

1. Have your car tuned regularly. An engine tune-up can improve car fuel economy by an average of 1 mile per gallon.
2. Keep your tires properly inflated. Underinflated tires can decrease fuel economy by up to 1 mile per gallon.

Continued here…

So, instead of coming up with his own suggestions to help Americans conserve gasoline and save money today, the McCain campaign offered supporters Obama tire pressure gauges as a joke and kept beating the offshore drilling drums.

That pretty much sums up the McCain campaign so far.  They don’t have anything useful to say about their candidate so they spend all their time and money talking about Barack Obama right down to buying Google ads to try to interject themselves into conversations on blogs.