Fear-Mongering on the Campaign Trail

While Barack Obama's text message campaign is both excessive (daily texts to promote voter action) and annoying (unsolicited, self-promoting texts) they aren't frightening. Plus there's little chance a text message will confront an unintended target. Not so with McCain's robo-calls. And that's intentional.

John McCain knows first hand that scare tactics work. Robo calls dealt a fatal blow when McCain challenged George W. Bush in the 2000 Republican presidential primaries. When faced with robo calls during his 2000 presidential bid McCain said: "I promise you I have never and will never have anything to do with that kind of political tactic."

Yet, when asked about his previous comments in recent interviews on FOX, CNN and MSNBC McCain supported his campaign's use of robo calls. He continues to vehemently defend the content of the calls, which indicts Democratic rival Barack Obama for his relationship with 60s radical Bill Eyers, as "absolutely true."

McCain points out that Obama and Eyers served together on the board of the Woods Foundation of Chicago. They did. But McCain's indictment implies that the Woods Foundation is a sinister, anti-American institution and fails to mention the Woods Foundation is a philanthropic organization devoted to poverty relief and the promotion of social mobility. Don't we want poverty relief and social mobility, Mr. McCain?

While Barack Obama and William Eyers served on the Woods Foundation board together, Obama also denounced Eyers's involvement with the Weathermen and the group's violent -- and deadly -- anti-war activity during the Vietnam War. Yet McCain's robo calls imply that the relationship between Obama and Eyers was social (i.e. Obama 'pals around with terrorists') rather than professional. The calls also imply that Obama was a party to the terrorist agenda because Obama "worked closely" with Eyers. A man, the calls say, "whose organization bombed the U.S. Capitol, the Pentagon and a judge's office and killed Americans." The calls draw a direct link between Barack Obama and terrorism, failing to clarify that Obama was only eight-years-old when these acts of domestic terrorism occurred.

Robo calls prey on the most vulnerable members of the electorate: the under-educated and ill informed. It's unconscionable that John McCain has resorted to the tactics he denounced during his Maverick days. Even more so, McCain hired the man who engineered the fear-mongering robo call attacks against him in the 2000 primaries to do so.

The John McCain of 2000 understood that those who vote out of fear, or inspire others to do so, do a disservice to themselves and the ideal of democracy. In February of 2000 McCain said: "If all you run are negative attack ads you don't have much of a vision for the future or you're not ready to articulate it. Apparently the John McCain of 2008 has forgotten this.