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The blogosphere's all a-buzz over Kerry's "tough" ad called Old Tricks. It features a clip from a 2000 debate where John McCain tells Bush he should be "ashamed" for sliming McCain as anti-veteran, through fringe group surrogates. The camera moves to Bush's face, just as it is assuming what Joshua Marshall calls a "callow, trapped look," and freezes in a kind of "gotcha" way. The screen goes dark and the commercial ends with the caption "America Deserves Better." This is so manipulative--I hate that elections get decided on such gimmicky editing tricks. In case anyone else wondered how Bush answered McCain, here's an excerpt from a recent James Fallows article, liberated from the Atlantic's archive via the google cache:
McCain held a tight smile. "Let me tell you what really went over the line," he said shortly afterward, when asked by King for a reply. At a recent Bush rally Bush had stood alongside someone McCain called "a spokesman for a fringe veterans' group," who had denounced McCain for "abandoning" Vietnam veterans.
With feigned politeness, McCain told Bush, "I don't know if you can understand this, George, but that really hurts. It really hurts." No mention of McCain's service as a military pilot, nor of his imprisonment and torture in the "Hanoi Hilton"; everyone knew what McCain meant. McCain turned to King. "And so five United States senators—Vietnam veterans, heroes, some of them really incredible heroes—wrote George a letter and said, 'Apologize.' You should be ashamed."
Bush sputtered, "Let me speak to that ..."
McCain faced him again, calm but contemptuous: "You should be ashamed."
It went on for minutes. Bush protested McCain's underhanded tricks—why, one of McCain's supporters, the former senator Warren Rudman, had said that the Christian Coalition included "bigots." Of McCain's military heroism Bush lamely said, "I'm proud of your record, just like you are," and conceded—in an "okay, are you happy now?" tone—that McCain had "served his country well" and had not abandoned veterans. But he was still unhappy himself: "You can disagree with me on issues, John, but do not question—do not question my trustworthiness, and do not compare me to Bill Clinton." It was Bush's worst onstage moment in the 2000 campaign. He managed to sound both self-righteous and rattled by McCain's direct challenge to his tactics and implied slight to his courage. This is a tape the Kerry campaign will want to examine—while remembering that Bush went on to beat McCain in South Carolina.