OK, enough is enough. We see that McCain and Palin are going to lie, lie and more lie, all the way to election day. That is their game plan. They have no ethical standards. They have no integrity. They are rabid. They are desperate. They will do anything & say anything to win, and they have no problem with that.
It is not enough for the Obama Campaign to sternly call McCain out on his lies and sleaze. To do so is merely playing defense, merely whining, and it isn't going to stop McCain and Palin from lying & sleazing.
The way to respond to McCain's and Palin's lies is for Obama/the Dems to do a silver bullet move on McCain that takes McCain out of contention once and for all, NOW.
And, this is not just about the Dems winning the WH in 2008; This is also about preventing the very real possibility of having an unnecessary all-out global nuclear war under a bellicose hotheaded McCain presidency.
Temperament: The silver bullet issue that takes out McCain once and for all!
Obama/the Dems can & must take out McCain on the issue of McCain's hotheaded temperament & war mongering, the way that the Johnson campaign in 1964 took out Goldwater on the issue of Goldwater's temperament & war mongering, and that means doing it viscerally, on a gut level, in a way that makes most everyone shudder in horror at the thought of a John McCain (or a Sarah Palin) actually having access to the nuclear button.
This is NOT about panicking; this IS about GUARANTEEING an Obama victory over McCain in November!
And, it is about the truth!
Here is how the Johnson campaign did it back in 1964:
LBJ "Daisy Ad" political commercial, aired September 7, 1964
"I just shudder to think what would happen if Goldwater won it. He's a man that's had two nervous breakdowns. He's not a stable fellow at all."
— President Lyndon B. Johnson to Texas Governor John Connally, from a 7/23/64 White House telephone tape recording
LINK - AUDIO
The "Daisy Ad" never used Goldwater’s name or image, yet viewers understood its central message: that Goldwater might use atomic weapons. The ad advanced the idea that Goldwater could not be trusted with his finger on the button, and the ad did not have to explicitly name Goldwater, because Goldwater had already established himself publically as a hawk who might use nuclear weapons in Europe and Vietnam, so all the Johnson campaign had to do was bring the horror of that use into the American living room on a gut visceral level, and let the American public make the connection to Goldwater.
The ad accomplished two things at once: it implicitly framed Goldwater as a reckless person who might somehow cause some sort of atomic conflict, while simultaneously framing Johnson as a responsible, peace-loving custodian of the nation's nuclear arsenal.
In a July 20, 1964 telephone conversation (LINK - AUDIO), Johnson's press secretary George Reedy provided to Johnson what may have been the initial seed of the idea to tap into the fears of voters on a gut visceral level that eventually became the Johnson campaign's "Daisy Ad" initiative:
"Now, I think there's a weakness to Goldwater. I think the big weakness is that people think he's pretty reckless. And I think the one thing that we ought to get at now is some of the things that he has said about the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, but not say it in the way that it has been said. I think we gotta get this thing down to some gut things: Mothers that are worried about having radioactive poison in their kids' milk. Men that are worried about becoming sterile. Uh, give them some thoughts about maybe kids being born with two heads and things like that, and that my God you're going to have this reckless man who shoots from the hip and who talks first and thinks afterwards."
The "Daisy Ad" was aired by the Johnson campaign proper only once, on September 7, 1964, during the NBC Monday Night Movie telecast of "David and Bathsheba", and the following night all three network news broadcasts showed the ad in its entirety.
The estimated audience for the ad's first airing was 50 million viewers. A Harris Poll taken a week after the ad first aired reported that 53% of women and 45% of men believed that Goldwater would involve the United States in a war.
The Johnson campaign’s advertising strategy worked: Johnson won in a landslide, and post-election polls indicated that many people voted less in favor of Johnson and more out of fear of Goldwater.
In 1964, the Bill Moyers that we know from PBS was Johnson's "Special Assistant to the President" who oversaw various aspects of the 1964 campaign. On September 13, 1964, Bill Moyers wrote a memo to Johnson that summarized the intended strategy behind the "Daisy Ad" and how pleased the campaign was with its impact:
Mr. President:
While most of our radio-television campaign is to project you and your record, we decided - - - as you may recall - - - to run a few earlier spots just to "touch up" Goldwater a bit and remind people that he is not as moderate as his recent speeches want them to believe he is. The idea was not to let him get away with building a moderate image and to put him on the defensive before the campaign is very old.
I think we succeeded in our first spot - - - the one on the control of nuclear weapons.
It caused his people to start defending him right away. Yesterday (Republican National Committee Chairman) Burch said: "This ad implies that Senator Goldwater is a reckless man and Lyndon Johnson is a careful man." Well, that's exactly what we wanted to imply. And we also hoped someone around Goldwater would say it, not us. They did. Yesterday was spent in trying to show that Goldwater isn't reckless.
Furthermore, while we paid for the ad only on NBC last Monday night, ABC and CBS ran it on their news shows Friday. So we got it shown on all three networks for the price of one.
This particular ad was designed to run only one time. We have a few more Goldwater ads, none as hard-hitting as that one was, and then we go to the pro-Johnson, pro-Peace, Prosperity, Preparedness spots.
Bill Moyers
Lloyd Wright, whom Bill Moyers recruited to join him in the election effort and coordinate the advertising and media work of the Johnson campaign, was asked much later if he could recall his first impressions of the "Daisy Ad". Wright laughed and said: "Wow. That was my reaction. Wow, that really does hit. We knew it would have an enormous impact. It was a very impactful ad." Wright added that "there was some debate (on whether to air the spot). Bill [Moyers] and I discussed it. We always tried to anticipate reaction. We judged that there would be — a very powerful reaction. But we judged it to be so effective in pursuit of our strategy that any risk involved was worth the taking."
The following video clip from the 1983 thriller film The Dead Zone (based on the fictional Stephen King novel of the same name) nicely depicts I think what could happen under a McCain presidency, all-out global thermonuclear war, due to a combination of McCain's anger management problem, McCain's perverse psychotic "bomb bomb Iran" neocon worldview, and McCain's impulsive, reckless, shoot-from-the-hip mindset of resolving all conflicts & all disputes in one-track simple-minded terms of all-out military confrontation and all-out absolute military "victory".
Here is some movie plot background for you to understand the following "Dead Zone" clip.
Johnny Smith (Christopher Walken) awakens from a five-year-long coma to find that he has acquired new psychic powers. Johnny discovers that post-coma he now has the ability to learn a person's secrets (past, present, & future) through making physical contact with that person.
The clip begins at a small-time conventional political rally for a rising local political star, Greg Stillson (Martin Sheen). At this rally Johnny makes physical contact with Stillson in the form of a standard political rally-type handshake, which enables Johnny to foresee that Stillson will someday be elected President of the United States, with disastrous consequences. In Johnny's vision of the future here, Stillson, as president, will start an unnecessary (there is a diplomatic solution) all-out nuclear war, which Stillson insanely regards as "his historical destiny" to fullfill, presumably destroying all of civilization:
In Robert Greenwald's latest free-distribution web film, fellow McCain POW and highly decorated veteran Phillip Butler argues that McCain is temperamentally unfit to be president:
"He [John McCain] was well known by his own classmates and everybody that knew him as a very volatile guy and he would blow up and go off like a Roman candle at any possible time. He was very sensitive and touchy and just easy to anger."
"The world is such a dangerous place and he has shown himself already to be bellicose with regard to making other wars in other places."
"John McCain is not somebody that I would like to see with his finger near the red button."
"John McCain's temperament makes it clear that he's not cut out to be president of the United States."
PS: Somebody with the right inside channels, please get this diary to the Obama campaign. Let's leave nothing to chance.
DIARY POLL QUESTION BELOW:
The "Daisy Ad" ran on September 7, 1964, which was well in advance of voting day on November 3rd, 1964.
Based on that 1964 advertising timeline, do you think that Obama/the Dems are now well overdue to take the fight to McCain hard on the issue of McCain's temperament via a major advertising program? When do you think they should do this, if at all?
CREDITS; "Daisy Ad" information resources utilized for this diary:
DAISY: THE COMPLETE HISTORY OF AN INFAMOUS AND ICONIC AD
Daisy television advertisement Wikipedia
What Else Do You Need To Know To Analyze an Ad?
DIARY NOTES:
This new diary here by me is a substantial redo of this previous diary by me (published Tue Sep 09 2008 at 07:59:24 PM EDT); my new diary here contains newly added content and a new more urgent tone, while my previous diary contains many more examples of the hotheaded McCain's anger management problem. I felt that my new diary here was enough of a redo to warrant republication, plus I wanted to try republishing to a different morning reader audience here instead. Finally, I feel that the very real possibility of having an unnecessary all-out global nuclear war under a hotheaded McCain presidency warrants republication of this diary's overall message.
Thank you for reading all this!