McCain campaign, GOP launch 'robocalls' in battleground states
Questioning Obama's links to former radical
With 17 days until the election, John McCain and his Republican allies are stepping up their character assaults, which paint Barack Obama in television ads, mail, and now, automated phone calls, as a shifty coddler of terrorists.
McCain's candidacy has stalled as the nation's economic problems have deepened, and his campaign has increasingly focused on raising questions about Obama's character and background.
In the latest round, McCain's campaign and the Republican National Committee this week began sending at least four different recorded telephone messages to voters in about a dozen battleground states, including Maine and New Hampshire.
The most widely played is a sinister description of Obama's relationship with William Ayers, who led a radical antiwar group that bombed government buildings in the early 1970s. The caller says, "You need to know that Barack Obama has worked closely with domestic terrorist Bill Ayers, whose organization bombed the US Capitol, the Pentagon, a judge's home, and killed Americans."
The automated call does not mention that Obama worked with Ayers, now a college professor, on a nonprofit education reform project in Chicago more than two decades after Ayers was involved with the group, Weather Underground. Obama has condemned Ayers's actions.
"Senator McCain calls Ayers an old, washed-up terrorist. If that's the case, why is he spending all this money on these nasty, dirty, robocalls?" Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor asked.
McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said yesterday that Obama's record and past associations are fair game and "raise serious questions" about Obama's judgment and candor. The automated calls are justified, he said, because Obama has not fully explained his relationship with Ayers, whom Rogers called an "unrepentant domestic terrorist."
Other automated calls say that Obama and Democrats "want to give civil rights to terrorists," oppose "requiring doctors to care for babies born alive after surviving attempted abortions," and are "putting Hollywood above America" because they held a fund-raiser during the financial crisis.
"Civil rights to terrorists" is an apparent reference to Democrats' endorsement of a Supreme Court ruling this year that gave terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay the constitutional right to appeal their detentions in US courts. The abortion reference is to an Obama vote in the Illinois Legislature, but he argued in this week's debate that state law already required emergency care in such cases.
The calls are a relatively inexpensive form of message delivery compared to television and radio advertising, which Obama is dominating by outspending McCain heavily in virtually every battleground state. Obama has millions more to spend, made possible by his record-breaking fund-raising and decision to opt out of public financing in the general election, which limits spending to $84.1 million in public funding.
McCain accepted public financing and the spending limits that come with it. But the calls, like many of his TV ads, also take a slap generally at Democrats, so the Republican National Committee can split the cost with his campaign.
But McCain's campaign complained about similar automated calls about him before the South Carolina primary in January, and even some McCain supporters question their effectiveness.
"I think robocalls are a nuisance and annoying," Peter Spaulding, chairman of McCain's campaign in New Hampshire, told the New Hampshire Union Leader yesterday. "I think it's a waste of money to send robocalls no matter what the message is."
Spaulding, a McCain loyalist since 1999, told the newspaper that while "Obama did do those things" asserted in the calls, "I don't think it's a particularly salient issue."
Late yesterday, a spokesman for Senator Susan M. Collins, Republican of Maine, said she would denounce the calls and ask McCain's campaign to stop them.
Besides New Hampshire and Maine, the calls have been played in Colorado, Nevada, Wisconsin, New Mexico, Virginia, Florida, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina.
Obama's campaign has also launched its share of assaults on character rather than policy, but not in the volume or ferocity of the Republicans'.
Another new Republican player has emerged late in the campaign, hammering the same terrorist themes as McCain and the national GOP. Established only a few weeks ago, the National Republican Trust Political Action Committee has created a new TV ad that attempts to link Obama's support for states issuing driver's licenses to undocumented immigrants as a public safety measure to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
The ad shows the Florida driver's license of Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers who commandeered a plane from Boston and flew it into the World Trade Center, and asserts that the success of the plot depended on "easy-to-get" licenses. It says Obama is "too radical, too risky."
However, the 9/11 Commission's investigation found that a failure of US intelligence, not the issuance of driver's licenses, made the attacks possible and that all of the attackers had entered the country legally, though the visas of some had lapsed by the time of the attacks.
Scott Wheeler, the PAC's executive director, said the ad was to begin airing last night in Ohio and would run through Tuesday. However, the group had not yet filed a report with the Federal Election Commission as of late yesterday. The PAC has reported spending more than $200,000 in opposition to Obama over the past two weeks, almost all of it on e-mails or Internet ads designed to raise funds.
Wheeler said he and others established the PAC last month because the news media "have told us very little about Barack Obama. . . . People just feel Senator Obama is a mystery . . . and has a history of associations with people who have an agenda." 