New McCain General Election Ad: "I Hate War" It took me a little while to figure out what this
http://digbysblog.blogspot.com">new John McCain ad reminded me of.
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"Only a fool or a fraud talks tough or romantically about war," McCain tells the camera. "I was shot down over Vietnam and spent five years as a POW. Some of the friends I served with never came home. I hate war. And I know how terrible its costs are."
Never mind that McCain
routinely romanticizes war, such as in his books like
Faith of My Fathers or
Worth The Fighting For (yes, for some reason there's a "the" in there). But let's try and determine what's really going on here. In the midst of a war he's cheerleaded for five years, he comes out and tells us how much he hates war, leaving unsaid any desiresor strategies to end the current one.
It reminded me an awful lot of this Richard Nixon ad from 1968:
(Video:
Nixon commercial)
Nixon talked in slightly more explicit terms about new leadership and an honorable end to Vietnam. But there was no substance behind the talk. While the visual styles are different, each suited to its time period, these are basically the same ads. Rick Perlstein writes about the Nixon ads in his book Nixonland on page 333:
Nixon's commercials would run without narration as well. The sound would only be music and snippets from stump speeches. The images, rapid-fire collages of still photographs, told the story just as effectively with the sound off, a visual semaphore. TV specialist Harry Treleaven was so proud of their aesthetic force that he screened them for curators at the Museum of Modern Art, hoping they might be added to the collection. The aesthetes were unimpressed: "The good guys are either soldiers, children, or over fifty years old." It was a telling moment: that's why Treleaven believed they belonged in the museum. He responded, "Nixon has not only developed the use of the platitude, he's raised it to an art form" - a mirror of Americans' "delightful misconceptions of themselves and their country." (He meant it as a compliment.) (Gene, the combat photographer who created the spots) Jones's assistant imagined staging the State of the Union the same way - intercut with heart-tugging stills.
While McCain's spots have that personal touch of narration, they really are meant to evoke the same "delightful misconceptions" - meant to make the viewer feel good instead of informed about any agenda or plan for the future. If you felt good about Nixon pursuing an honorable end to the war in Vietnam, you were comfortable with his escalation into Cambodia and carper-bombing of the North. If you feel satisfied with McCain's explanation about his hatred of war, you won't mind so much when he declares it approximately once every 28.4 seconds upon reaching the Oval Office.
linkLast year, the RW National Review contemplated who among the Repub candidates would be able to run an ad similar to
Peace with Honor:
Brink Lindsey and Ross Douthat see past as prologue in this Nixon ad calling for an honorable end to the Vietnam war.
They might be right. But, this raises an interesting question: Which Democrat could plausibly run such an ad? Frankly, with the exception of Joe Lieberman, it's hard to see how any of them could play the Nixonian peace-with-honor card. That's because the analogy breaks down when you look at the nature of the two parties, both in '68 and today. Vietnam spelled the end of Democratic hawkish internationalism and, to a certain extent, the beginning of a new Republican era of hawkish internationalism (there are important caveats to be made about the GOP, but irrelevant to this discussion).
When Richard Nixon promised an "honorable end" to the Vietnam war it had specific resonance because of Nixon's record as an anti-Communist hawk. Anti-Communists trusted that Nixon understood the real threat of Communism. Hillary may have — until recently — burnished her hawkish credentials, but she's hardly a Democratic Nixon. And her supporters are hardly the war-on-terror equivalent of raging anti-Communists. Does anyone think that Hillary is particularly passionate about the Islamist threat? Is there anything like a Nixon-to-China move she could pull off? And the rest of the Democratic field is far more dovish than Hillary.
The irony here is that the most likely candidate to run the most persuasive Nixonian strategy would be one of several Republicans. McCain, Giuliani, Romney, Thompson or even (especially?) Gingrich could all pull off this sort of ad better than any of the Democrats. Of course, it would have to be a bit more subtle. But the point remains that the '08 Democrats — their real advantages notwithstanding — are not poised to be the Republicans of '68.
McCain hates war?
Kerry: "when McCain disavows diplomacy, he is stacking the deck in favor of war."McCain on Iraq
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