The Dow Jones finished 300 points down today, hitting a four-year low. Credit markets are frozen, which means businesses can’t get a loan. Europe’s facing its own financial crisis.
What does the McCain campaign want to talk about? A comment Democrat Barack Obama made more than a year ago about Afghanistan, words that U.S. Rep. Joe Pitts who represents Lancaster says equate to calling U.S. soldiers war criminals.
What Obama said during a townhall meeting in August 2007 was he wanted to better fund the U.S. mission in Afghanistan so Allied troops don’t become overly stressed and inadvertently make mistakes like firing on civilians. And figures provided by the Associated Press at that time showed Afghanistan civilian deaths at the hands of Western troops at 286 while military insurgents had killed 233, a situation that prompted Afghan Pres. Hamid Karzai to meet with President Bush.
Republicans held a press conference this afternoon at Lancaster GOP headquarters with Pitts and Lancaster County Clerk of Courts Ryan Aument, an Iraq War veteran. They said they had just been made aware of Obama’s comments and added that it emboldens terrorists around the world. The press conference coincided with a new television ad highlighting the comments, although Obama’s words are spliced and taken out of context.
Why in the world are we talking about comments Obama made more than a year ago? And if those comments embolden the enemy, why are Republicans drawing attention to them and flaunting them to the local and national media? Heck, isn’t the fact Osama bin Laden has escaped prosecution for the 9/11 attacks for seven years (thus re-established itself in Pakistan and capable to carrying our more attacks) more emboldening to al Qaeda than what Obama said at a townhall meeting a year ago?
The answers of course are in the numbers. The McCain campaign has Pennsylvania circled as a place they can siphon away from Democrats, and with the Keystone’s 21 electoral votes, winning Pennsylvania may sweep McCain into the White House. While the average poll has Obama up in Pennsylvania by about 9 percent, McCain camp appears to believe the race is closer than that. By diverting attention away from the economy - half of registered voters in Pennsylvania believe the economy is the most important issue and most of them give Obama the nod - McCain is trying to get local and national media to focus on two things: National security and Obama’s readiness to be commander-in-chief.
The most recent Franklin & Marshall College Poll showed only 5 percent of voters consider foreign policy the most important issue while the Quinnipiac Poll last week put terorism at 8 percent. That’s not even one out of every 10 voters, but 57 percent of voters in the F&M poll believe McCain is a better fit to be president. Only 28 percent believe Obama’s experience has prepared him to be president, according to F&M’s poll. If McCain can raise the profile of national security and Obama’s readiness, he might tighten the race in Pennsylvania and pull off an upset.
The race has even gotten to the point where Pitts during today’s press conference about Afghanistan connected Obama’s comments in the townhall meeting to a supposed relationship Obama has with former Weather Underground co-founder William Ayers. Media reports have thus far found no tie between Obama and Ayers other than the two participated in a fundraiser for a Chicago school in 1995. More on that later.
Expect more of this in the coming days and weeks from McCain surrogates.
