Responding to a harsh personal attack from John McCain, Barack Obama released a television ad late Wednesday evening accusing the the Arizona Republican's campaign of dirty, superficial politics.
The spot, titled "The Low Road," witnesses the Illinois Democrat playing his trump card: tying McCain to George W. Bush, both in politics and in policy.
"He's practicing the politics of the past: John McCain," reads the ad. "His attacks on Barack Obama: not true, false, baloney, the low road, baseless. John McCain same old politics same failed policies."
A picture of the presumptive Republican nominee shaking hands with the soon-to-be-departed president fills the screen.
"Barack Obama supports a $1,000 middle class tax cut, an energy plan that takes on oil companies, develops alternative fuels and breaks the grip of foreign oil."
The advertisement comes hours after the McCain camp caused a stir of its own when it put out a spot comparing Obama to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, both in terms of international celebrity and (more subtly) lack of substance. The Obama campaign and the Senator himself denounced the ad, but their rebuttal advertisement is a stronger repudiation. This spot, at once, positions the Senator as above the fray while tying McCain to the widely-unpopular tactics of the Bush years.
Aides to the Illinois Democrat said they did not know, at this time, how big the ad buy would be.
UPDATE: The Democratic Party is sending out this nugget from a new CNN/Opinion Research Corporation national poll, which suggest that McCain's harsh negative tone may be backfiring. Four in ten voters said that McCain had been attacking Obama unfairly while just more than two in ten say that Obama has attacked McCain unfairly.
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