October 25, 2007--Woodstocked

As John McCain crawls back into double digits in the polls he is again feeling feisty, and it doesn’t hurt that he’s been able to raise a few dollars to run campaign ads in New Hampshire. He’s is betting the farm that he can do as well in the Granite State as he did eight years ago when he was the upset winner and steamed down to South Carolina, the site of the next primary, confident that he could win there as well since it’s the home state of so many veterans. And he was the quintessential veteran, having spent six years as a prisoner in the Hanoi Hilton. But as we all know, he was beaten there by a National Guard chicken hawk named George W. Bush, and the rest is history. There are a couple of things germane to this year’s McCain efforts that derive from his experience in 2000. Though his fame and viability depended on his having been a brave and resilient prisoner of war, he resisted talking explicitly about it back then, feeling that he did not want to parade that before the public as a cheap technique to elicit emotion for him and his run for the White House. And, second, he lost because the Bush Anschluss led by Karl Rove had the chutzpah to call his patriotism into question and mounted a whispering campaign that claimed he had fathered an illegitimate child with a black woman. Thus, modern-day Swiftboating was born, and we know what happened four years later to poor John Kerry. With $100,000 of new money McCain is running a TV ad across New Hampshire that is designed to put him over the top. It was produced by Foxhole Productions. Get it--Foxhole. In many ways, it was inspired by what happened to him in South Carolina. Sort of like a perverted flashback, it turns what was done to him onto his leading opponent. No, not Rudy or Mitt but . . . Hillary. It chastises her for securing an earmark, $1.0 million of pork-barrel money for a museum to commemorate the 1969 Woodstock Festival. To make sure those too young to remember Woodstock get the point, the ad shows images of drug-crazed concertgoers dancing in the mud wearing, well, hardly anything. One could easily argue that Hillary’s (and Chuck Schumer’s) slice of pork was not the best way to spend a million bucks; but the implication, actually since it’s not that subtle, the contention that Hillary (and Bill, let’s not forget him) are responsible for the cultural pox that infects our youth is a bit of a stretch. But there’s more. Remember the McCain who to his political disadvantage, and thus nobly, demurred from talking about his years of incarceration and torture? Well, the new, more desperate-to-be-president McCain this time around has no hesitancy flaunting his POW history. Thus, the new ad includes a quip about it—He says that he couldn’t be at the “pharmaceutical event” while Hillary (and Bill) were hanging out there, because he “was all tied up.” And to underscore that latter point, since the former one is a lie, images flash across the screen of POW McCain lying on a litter while smoking a cigarette. (See linked NY Times article.) Sic transit gloria McCain . . .