John McCain's first general election ad began airing today with an ad buy in New Mexico. The ad, whose slogan is "The American president Americans have been waiting for," is titled "624787," a reference to the number by which McCain identifies himself in the grainy black and white video taken of him while a POW. As many of his web ads over the course of the primary did, this one creepily exploits his status as a POW to hit us over the head with his war hero credentials.
I think it's pretty clear that the ad wears its expectation that Obama will be McCain's general election opponent on its sleeve the way it plays up the patriotism angle (a narrative the right clearly expects will pay dividends for them against Obama in the fall) and the experience angle (with references to "ready on day one" and "walk the walk.") The problem with this for McCain, though, is that if Obama does end up as the Democratic nominee it will mean that the experience argument attempted by Clinton against Obama will have failed. I know it's pretty much all McCain has but is he really prepared to just entirely cede the change mantle to Obama, or even Clinton for that matter? The McCain campaign probably thinks there's plenty of time to make that case but when the Democrats are already hammering the message that McCain is nothing but 4 more years of Bush, you'd think he'd try to use the first ad of the campaign to counter that. Instead, what they're doing here is spending thousands of dollars to reinforces what people already think of McCain.
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