"Low Road" (with video)

BarackObamadotcom, video (00:31):

"Low Road" addresses false and debunked attack ads that have recently run on television. On the air...

"Group Responds To McCain Ad: Britney And McCain Both Heart Bush!" (TPM Election Central, with video):

The vid shows a well-known, and particularly vacuous, Britney moment where she professes undying trust in Bush, and pairs it with McCain offering a similar sentiment, if not quite as mindlessly.

"Obama Reacts To 'Celeb' Ad" (WaPo, video).

"We Are the "War Room" that We Have Been Waiting For" (Al Giordano, The Field):

Politics has thus evolved from the centralized "war room" of the 1990s to a decentralized one that exists in a million or two homes right now, of which bloggers and independent media are a new kind of precinct captain that needs no orders from headquarters nor permission to take initiative. We saw that at work last weekend in the rapid response from the bottom up to the McCain campaign's false claims in a television ad about Obama's European trip. Only four days later, the McCain camp has backed down.

"A challenge for the cable and broadcast media" (Jed Report):

As several commenters and e-mailers have noted, now that Barack Obama has responded to John Bush McCain's attack ads with his most forceful counterpunch of the campaign, the question is whether the cable networks and broadcast news networks will spend as much time analyzing Obama's attack on McCain as they have today about McCain's attack on Obama.

"McCain Tries to Define Obama as Out of Touch" (NY Times):

Mr. McCain’s campaign is now under the leadership of members of President Bush’s re-election campaign, including Steve Schmidt, the czar of the Bush war room that relentlessly painted his opponent, Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, as effete, elite, and equivocal through a daily blitz of sound bites and Web videos that were carefully coordinated with Mr. Bush’s television advertisements.

The run of attacks against Mr. Obama over the last couple of weeks have been strikingly reminiscent of that drive, including the Bush team’s tactics of seeking to make campaigns referendums on its opponents — not a choice between two candidates — and attacking the opponent’s perceived strengths head-on. Central to the latest McCain drive is an attempt to use against Mr. Obama the huge crowds and excitement he has drawn, including on his foreign trip last week, by promoting a view of him as more interested in attention and adulation than in solving the problems facing American families.

Barack Obama