Vacation is over

[womzilla]

And it is ON.

This is easily the nastiest ad I've ever seen a Democratic presidential candidate run*, and it's just barely starting to scrape the surface of the vast pool of sleeze that is "Crash" McCain.

* I was not yet alive the only time the "Daisy" ad actually ran.

And we need to see that final image over and over and over and over and over again for the next 80 days, maybe interspersed with Huggy Bear McCain.

Comments

[crowleycrow.livejournal.com]

The Daisy ad (I saw it at the time) did not strike me as nasty. It struck me as intensely heartfelt, whether in fact it was or was not, and whether in fact LBJ was more or less likely to fire the missles than Goldwater. Just tell me the last time you heard any politician anywhere quote W.H. Auden, regardless of whether he thought of doing it himself or not: "We must love one another or die." ("We must love one another or we must die" as LBJ had it.) He was so right at that moment that it transcended politics.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

I can see that. My reception of it has always been that it was very blunt and targeted directly at the worst impulses of Goldwater and his branch of the party. Internally, that has always seemed like a very nasty approach, even when completely honest and important. But that perception of nastiness is colored by a) years of being told that this was a nasty ad, and b) a generally leeching away of blunt forthrightness from the Democratic Party in the wake of Nixonland. By the time I started paying attention to politics, long gone were the days of Harry S Truman's "I only tell the truth and they think it's hell" or FDR's "I welcome their hatred". And we need more of it.