Rove attack machine lives

With this its clear that McCain’s respectable campiagn is finished:

McCain takes aim at Obama’s character

As Senator Barack Obama traveled overseas, the campaign against him appeared to take a decisive new turn with Senator John McCain zeroing in on his Democratic opponent’s character.

In a year when polls show an easy victory for a generic Democratic candidate, McCain has until now been loathe to employ the tack many strategists see as essential and which anonymous e-mailers and commenters with no apparent links to his campaign have been practicing since last summer: hitting Obama not on his record or his platform, but on his values and person.

The Democrat’s Achilles’ heel in this model is an inchoate sense among some voters that the new arrival on the national stage with the unusual biography—and who’s the first black nominee from either party—isn’t American enough.

Prior to Obama’s trip overseas, though, McCain had instead employed, without appreciable effect, a more conventional critique of his opponent as an ordinary politician, a “flip-flopper,” and, of course, a liberal.

On Saturday, though, McCain released a new television advertisement in which the announcer says that on his trip, Obama “made time to go to the gym, but cancelled a visit with wounded troops. Seems the Pentagon wouldn’t allow him to bring cameras.”

“John McCain is always there for our troops,” adds the announcer, before concluding with the campaign’s new slogan: “McCain, country first.”

The slogan’s inverse implication for his opponent was made clear earlier in the week, when McCain accused Obama of placing the his political ambitions before the national interest.

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