As the 2008 presidential campaign hurtles into its final days, John
McCain confronts a choice: He can either start telling the public about
the real Barack Obama, or he can lose.
For much of his career, McCain has been a media darling. He could count
on the press to carry his water as long as he was a
“maverick” Republican, driving more conservative members of
his party crazy. But as he surely knows by now, when it comes to Barack
Obama and the press, all bets are off. In covering Obama, the press has
adopted a “don’t ask/don’t tell” policy
designed to boost the least-vetted, least-known candidate ever to seek
the presidency. It isn’t by accident that the media has denied
all less-than-glowing stories about Obama the kind of consistent,
sustained coverage that allows them to penetrate public consciousness.
If McCain is going to have a chance at winning, he must make sure that
the public becomes thoroughly acquainted with the real Barack Obama
– the most radical presidential nominee ever. And because the
press evidently intends to abdicate its responsibility to acquaint
voters with the less-popular parts of Obama’s record, he’ll
have to rely on paid advertising to do it.
For starters, McCain should consider running a series of “Did You
Know” ads about Barack Obama. He should ask voters, “Did
you know that:
Barack Obama has multiple ties to those responsible for the present economic crisis?:
Franklin Raines, the immediate past CEO of Fannie
Mae – who has collected a $90 million golden parachute while
driving Fannie into the ground – has advised Obama on housing
issues.
Jim Johnson, yet another former Fannie Mae CEO,
resigned from Obama’s vice presidential search team when it was
revealed he had received a sweetheart home mortgage deal.
Despite serving in the Senate for only four years,
Obama himself has been the second-largest recipient of Fannie Mae and
Freddie Mac largesse in the entire Congress, ahead even of former
presidential candidate John Kerry, who’s spent two decades in the
Senate?
Obama’s long-time political ally, radical
group ACORN, played a key role in pressuring banks to offer loans to
those who were unlikely to be able to pay them back. ACORN has taken
credit for pressuring banks to accept undocumented income as a basis
for offering loans, for offering loans without using credit scores, and
for making 100% financed loans available to low-income people.
There is more, of course. Do voters know:
That, in apparent defiance of federal election law,
the Obama campaign refuses to identify individual donors who have
provided almost half the funds for his campaign, including obvious
fakes like “Mr. Good Will” and “Mr. Doodad
Pro”? And that 11,500 donations to his campaign – totaling
almost $34 million – may have come from overseas? Or that two
Palestinians living in a Hamas-controlled refugee camp spent $31,300 in
Obama’s online store? Who are all these people, and why
won’t the Obama campaign obey the law and identify them?
That Jeremiah Wright wasn’t Obama’s
first radical mentor? As a young man in Hawaii, Obama had a
quasi-filial relationship with radical Frank Marshall Davis – an
avowed member of the Communist Party of the USA. In fact, in his
memoirs, Obama concedes that he attended “socialist
conferences” and encountered Marxist literature. (Now imagine the
outcry if a Republican presidential candidate had such ties to a Nazi).
That the People's Weekly World – the official
newspaper of the Communist Party of the USA – has rhapsodized
about Obama’s presidential campaign, calling it a "transformative
candidacy that would advance progressive politics for the long term"?
(Think about how the press would react if a fascist newspaper heaped
such praise on McCain.)
That Obama has routinely tried to intimidate his
critics into silence? His political organization spearheaded a massive
campaign against a Chicago radio show that invited one of his critics
to appear – even after being asked (and refusing) to send a
representative to balance the program, hosted by a non-partisan
University of Chicago psychology professor. Worse, his campaign sought
to chill free speech by establishing a “truth squad” of
Missouri prosecutors and sheriffs, which threatened a “vigorous
response” to any ad presenting information about Obama that they
deemed to be “inaccurate.” And there are other examples.
That even as America struggles to “bail
out” our own struggling economy, Obama backs a global bailout?
His Global Poverty Initiative would assess $2500 per taxpayer,
according to Investor’s Business Daily, to fund a global war on
poverty administered by the UN and its agencies.
That despite touting his academic credentials as a
rationale for initiating a campaign for president just two years after
leaving the Illinois state legislature, Obama refuses to release either
his college or his law school transcripts – just as he sought to
keep records of his working relationship with former terrorist Bill
Ayers on The Annenberg Challenge (a left-wing educational foundation)
safely under wraps? What is it that he doesn’t want voters to
know?
Repeatedly, we’ve heard the media denounce the
“rumors” about Barack Obama that are, supposedly,
circulated on the internet exclusively by the bigoted and the ignorant.
But Americans sense that there is more to Barack Obama than
they’ve been told. Having witnessed the media’s own bias
and favoritism, they’ve come to suspect – reasonably
– that even if any of the rumors were true, the press might
choose to conceal them until the election is safely over. What’s
more, they wonder: What else is the press not telling us?
Certainly, it would be terribly wrong for John McCain to traffic in
rumors. But he doesn’t need to. The truth is more than enough.
There are facts that the American people deserve to know – and
which the press isn’t telling them. By filling in the gaps that
the media has left unmentioned, John McCain isn’t just doing
himself a service. He’s doing journalists’ job for them,
and allowing Americans to make an informed decision when they head to
the polls next month.
