In the (very near) future, presidential candidates will have national advertising campaign budgets of about $637 or so. They'll just make a few very low-tech ads full of stock photos and slanderous lies about their opponents, run the ad once at 3 a.m. on a small local news channel in the Midwest, and then let the news networks swoop in and show the ad in its entirety hundreds of times for free, repeating all of its slanderous lies each time. That's basically been John McCain's strategy so far, and it's working like a charm!
The number of times Senator John McCain's new advertisement attacking Senator Barack Obama for canceling a visit with wounded troops in Germany last week has been shown fully or partly on local, national and cable newscasts: well into the hundreds. The number of times that spot actually, truly ran as a paid commercial: roughly a dozen.
Awesome work. The added bonus is that the ad says Obama refused to visit wounded troops because they wouldn't give him enough publicity for it, and he'd rather play basketball with fellow Muslims anyhow. Neither aspect of which seems to be factually true. Decide for yourself: watch the ad below! We'll send the McCain campaign an invoice for this post. [NYT]