John McCain got his own taste of celebrity last week and evidently liked it — he’s back with a new ad ridiculing Barack Obama’s fame. 

The Republican candidate got a huge boost from accusing Obama of being a big celebrity like Paris Hilton and acting like some sort of political messiah.
 
Until his spate of negative attacks, McCain had been languishing ignored by the media while Obama triumphantly toured the world.
 
But last week McCain nearly tied Obama in the battle for media coverage — the first time that has happened since the start of the general election, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.
 
So the Arizona senator is returning ahead of Obama’s weeklong vacation in Hawaii with another advertisement ridiculing his fame. It also paints him as a big-tax Democrat.
 
“Life in the spotlight must be grand,” an announcer says as a camera pans over images of a smiling Obama on the covers of GQ, Vanity Fair and other magazines.
 
“But for the rest of us, times are tough,” the announcer says. “Obama voted to raise taxes on people making just $42,000. He promises more taxes. On small business. On seniors. Your life savings. Your family.”
 
“Painful taxes. Hard choices for your budget. Not ready to lead. That’s the real Obama.”
 
Scary stuff, but…
 
A study in mid-July by the Tax Policy Center — a venture of the Urban Institute and the Brookings Institution — found that Obama’s tax proposals would lift the after-tax income of the poorest 20 percent of Americans by 5.5 percent.
 
McCain’s plans would provide the poor with “virtually no benefit,” it said.
 
Nearly everyone else does better under Obama’s tax proposals as well.

Only the top 20 percent of U.S. wage earners would do better under McCain than Obama. The richest Americans would see after-tax income rise by 5.9 percent under McCain’s plans, while under Obama their after-tax income would drop by 2.8 percent, the study found.Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Top: Reuters/Bryan Snyder (McCain appears with former President George Bush in Maine July 21); Bottom: Reuters/Rebecca Cook (Obama at a speech in Michigan Aug. 4)

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama thinks John McCain is losing his credibility as a maverick.
 
Sure, the Arizona Republican has sometimes refused to go along with his party. Sure, he has occasionally cussed out Senate colleagues. And, yes, the word “maverick” is regularly attached to his name in the media.
 
But that was before McCain became the Republican presidential candidate. Now, Obama says, he has started changing his positions to please the party.
 
“That doesn’t exactly meet my definition of a maverick,” the Democratic presidential candidate told supporters in Indiana this week.
 
“You can’t be a maverick when politically it’s working for you and not a maverick when it doesn’t work for you,” Obama said.
 
The Illinois senator began taking jabs at McCain’s maverick image after suffering a week of taunts and insults from the Arizona senator’s campaign. McCain’s aides ridiculed Obama as a celebrity and accused of him injecting race into the campaign.
 
With some polls showing McCain gaining ground and the two candidates in a virtual tie, Obama is fighting back with his own negative attacks.
 
He has rolled out speeches and an ad challenging McCain’s maverick image, ridiculing a recent TV spot that touted the Arizona senator as “the original maverick.”
 

“Really?” Obama’s ad questions before cutting to a 5-year-old clip of McCain saying he had voted to back President George W. Bush 90 percent of the time.
 
“Maverick, or just more of the same?” the ad asks as the image on screen expands to show McCain posed in a photo with Bush.
 
The Democratic National Committee rolled out its own ad saying much the same thing: “Maverick No More.”
 
Ridicule or not, McCain is embracing the maverick moniker.
 
“You may have noticed that I have been called a maverick,” he told an Ohio crowd Thursday. “Sometimes it’s meant as a compliment. Sometimes it’s meant as a criticism, sometimes worse.
 
“But what it really means is that I understand who I work for. I don’t work for a party. I don’t work for a president. I don’t work for a special interest and I don’t work for myself. I work for you and the country we love.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

 Photo credit: Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain greets a veteran in Maine July 21)

Barack Obama’s soaring rhetoric on the campaign trail has given rival John McCain yet another epiphany.
 
Not only is Democratic presidential candidate the most popular celebrity in the world, not only has he injected race into the election, but he also must think he’s some sort of political messiah.
 
That’s the message the Arizona Republican put in a new video sent to his supporters.
 
“It shall be known that in 2008 the world will be blessed. They will call him The One,” the announcer intones in a voice of reverential authority.
 
The text of the one minute, 14 second video strings together phrases and pictures loaded with religious imagery and uses them to ridicule lines from Obama’s high-flying speeches.
 
“A light will shine down from somewhere. It will light upon you. You will experience an epiphany and you will say to yourself, ‘I have to vote for Barack’,” Obama says.
 
In case you missed the point, McCain trots out Republican icon Charlton Heston in his role as Moses in the epic movie “The Ten Commandments.”
 
“Behold His mighty hand,” Heston shouts. And as the actor raises his staff to part the waters of the Red Sea, Obama’s presidential-style seal comes swirling through the waves while a chant of “O-ba-ma! O-ba-ma!” swells in the background.
 
The video comes at the end of a week in which McCain has turned to negative attacks and ridicule in an effort to blunt Obama’s advantage in the polls for the Nov. 4 election. McCain’s campaign accused Obama of injecting race into the campaign and said he was attention-grabbing celebrity, more popular even than Britney Spears and Paris Hilton.

Obama has fought ridicule with seriousness.
 
“It’s downright sad that on a day when we learned that 51,000 Americans lost their jobs, a candidate for the presidency is spending all of his time and the powerful platform he has on these sorts of juvenile antics,” said spokesman Hari Sevugan.
 
“Barack Obama will continue talking about his plan to jump-start our economy by giving working families $1,000 of immediate relief.”
 
“We were having some fun with our supporters,” McCain told a news conference.
 
“I don’t think our campaign is negative in the slightest.”

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Joshua Roberts (Obama on Capitol Hill July 29)

John McCain thinks Barack Obama is playing the race card.
 
The Republican presidential candidate and his staff were upset by a comment Obama made on the campaign trail.
 
During a campaign speech, the Illinois Democrat told supporters Republicans were trying to make voters scared of him.
 
“What they’re saying is, well, we know we’re not very good, but you can’t risk electing Obama. You know, he’s new, he’s — he doesn’t look like the other presidents on the currency. He — you know, he’s got a — he’s got a funny name. I mean, that’s basically the argument, he’s too risky,” Obama said.
 
McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, jumped on the comment.
 
“Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong,” Davis said in a written statement.

 
McCain agreed with Davis, telling reporters he was “very disappointed” that Obama had used the race card.”Race will not have any role in my campaign, nor is there any place for it. I’m disappointed that he’s used it.” 
 
The back and forth came a day after Davis unveiled a new McCain attack ad comparing Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears, insisting in a conference call with reporters that Obama was the biggest celebrity in the world.
 
A report out the same day said about a third of McCain’s advertisements are negative attacks on Obama, while 90 percent of Obama’s ads don’t even mention McCain.
 
Obama spokesman David Plouffe told reporters Obama in no way used race as an issue and that McCain’s camp was trying to distract voters from larger issues.
 
“Folks ought to just buckle up their seat belts,” he added. “We assume this is what the campaign will be like.”

McCain dismissed Democratic charges he was taking the low road, saying Obama had “run negative ads on me continuously, and I might point out for the record that his was the first.” 

So what do you think? Does the McCain campaign have a legitimate complaint? Or is this just part of a strategy of using negative attacks erode Obama’s standing with voters? 

WASHINGTON - Barack Obama can’t seem to please the folks running John McCain’s campaign for the U.S. presidency.
 
They criticized the Democratic candidate for not visiting Iraq, but then he spent nine days abroad, visited both fronts in the U.S. war on terror, didn’t make any fatal mistakes and drew 200,000 people to a speech in Berlin.
 
Now the Republican’s campaign has a new beef against the Illinois senator — he’s way too popular, the most popular celebrity in the world, bigger even than Britney Spears or Paris Hilton.
 
It’s a point McCain makes in a new TV advertisement.
 
“I would say that it’s beyond dispute that he has become the biggest celebrity in the world. It’s a statement of fact. It’s backed up by the reality of his tour around the world,” McCain adviser Steve Schmidt told reporters in a conference call.
 
“They have more fans around the world than Britney Spears does. I make that bold blank statement,” added McCain campaign manager Rick Davis.
 
But McCain traveled around the world and met leaders too, so isn’t he a global celebrity as well? What’s the difference?
 
“We see him more as a global leader than a global celebrity,” Davis said. “When people in Asia, Africa, Europe, Latin America, want to talk to somebody who has a leadership and knowledge of positions around the world, they talk to John McCain. I contrast that with Barack Obama’s own trip to Europe. The focus on media, the focus on events and activities, is much more something you would expect from someone releasing a new movie than running for president.”
 
McCain’s crew sees devious motives behind the cultivation of popularity. Davis said it lets Obama “create a fan base around the world that allows him to get a lot of media attention and avoids him having to address the important issues of our time.”
 
But won’t people see the ad as negative campaigning?
 
Barack Obama started it, Davis said. He attacks McCain harshly every day on the campaign trail. Plus he was the first to turn to negative advertising, both in the primary and in the general election.
 
“I’m going to do everything in my power to protect my candidate,” Davis said.
 
“I’m going to let the American public decide what is negative or not negative.”

So what do you think, is it a fair ad or not?

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

Photo credit: Reuters/Jim Young (Crowds cheer Obama outside No. 10 Downing St. in London on July 26); Reuters/Brian Snyder (McCain speaks at campaign evenint in Maine July 21)

WASHINGTON - With Democrat Barack Obama trying to look presidential abroad and soon to face friendly crowds in the German capital, the Republican National Committee has decided to strike back by appealing to Berliners closer to home.
 
The party will air radio advertisements Thursday in Berlin, Pa., Berlin, Wis., and Berlin, N.H., bashing Obama’s voting record on defense issues, accusing him of choosing “Washington politics over the needs of our military.”
 
“Obama said that nobody wanted to play chicken with our troops on the ground,” an announcer intones. “But when it came time to act, he voted against critical resources: no to individual body armor, no to helicopters, no to ammunition, no to aircraft.”

The ad is a rehash of claims made in a television spot being aired by Obama’s rival Republican presidential candidate John McCain. FactCheck.org, in reviewing those claims, said the statements “are literally true but paint an incomplete picture.”
 
It is true Obama voted against a war-funding bill last year after President George W. Bush initially vetoed a version that contained a date for withdrawal from Iraq, the independent monitoring group said. Before that, Obama had cast at least 10 votes for war-funding bills, it said.

Obama’s campaign dismissed the ad as “distasteful and misleading.”
 
The RNC attacks are unlikely to dampen enthusiasm for Obama when he arrives Thursday in Berlin, Germany. A recent poll by the Bild newspaper found 72 percent of Germans would vote for Obama over McCain if they had a vote in U.S. elections.
 
Even German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a Bush friend who expressed displeasure over electioneering ahead of Obama’s visit, professed herself an admirer, telling reporters she thought the Democratic presidential candidate was “well-equipped — physically, mentally and politically.” 

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Reuters/Johannes Eisele (Obama campaign balloon flies in front of Victory Column (Siegessaeule) in Berlin, where he will speak on Thursday)

WASHINGTON - In case you were wondering how the Obama family keeps an orderly home while juggling jobs, presidential campaign, school, gymnastics, soccer, piano, dance, drama and tennis, People magazine has delved into the matter and found an answer: house rules. 
 
The magazine this week said it interviewed Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama and his family in their Chicago home earlier this summer and came away with seven rules that keep the family organized and happy.
 
They are:
 
1 - “No whining, arguing or annoying teasing,” says wife Michelle Obama.
 
2 - Make the bed. “Doesn’t have to look good-just throw the sheet over it,” she says.
 
3 - Set your own alarm clock. “They get themselves up, get their own clothes,” says Sasha and Malia’s grandmother Marian Robinson. “They’re very easy to take care of; there’s not much left for me to do!”
 
4 - Keep playroom toy closet clean.
 
5 - Allowance from dad for doing chores: $1 per week.
 
6 - No birthday or Christmas presents from mom and dad, who spend “hundreds” on birthday slumber parties and, as Barack puts it, “want to teach some limits.” Says Michelle: “Malia says, ‘I know there is a Santa because there’s no way you’d buy me all that stuff.’”
 
7 - Lights out at 8:30. “They got an extra half hour when they were ready to read on their own,” says Michelle.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage. 

Photo credit: Reuters/John Gress (Obama with wife Michelle, elder daughter Malia and younger daughter Sasha at an election rally May 20)

When Republican presidential contender John McCain delivered a speech in front of a green backdrop in June, comedian Stephen Colbert decided the Arizona senator’s campaign could use a bit more excitement.

Colbert, of Comedy Central’s “The Colbert Report,” issued the “Green Screen Challenge” to his viewers, urging them to take stock footage of McCain’s speech and turn  it into something more exciting.

Since then videos portraying McCain have been piling up on the YouTube and ColbertNation Web sites. He’s seen as a pelvis-twisting Elvis, a character in Star Trek and a model in a Madonna video, among other things. He even appears as Colbert himself.

Here are a several, in case you missed them.

WASHINGTON - What is it about Czechoslovakia and people with strong national security backgrounds?

First Republican presidential candidate John McCain referred to the country twice in as many days, even though it has not existed since 1993, when it split into the separate nations of Slovakia and the Czech Republic following the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Now comes former Georgia Sen. Sam Nunn, who mentioned Czechoslovakia while joining Democratic presidential Barack Obama on the campaign trail in Indiana.

Both men are recognized as strong voices on national security issues with a good handle on foreign affairs. But both had a slip of the tongue when discussing the Czech Republic, which has been negotiating with the Bush administration to host, along with Poland, part of  a U.S. missile defense system.

Here’s Nunn’s slip-up on Wednesday.

WASHINGTON - When it comes to critical leadership characteristics, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama tops Republican rival John McCain hands down, according to a self-styled business leadership guru.

John McKee, a founder of DirecTV who now works as an author, motivational speaker and career coach, says Obama outscores McCain when judged against 10 critical characteristics of great leaders, such as knowing what you stand for, helping others succeed, being a good listener and being honest and ethical.
 
Of the 10 leadership characterists he judged most critical, McKee said Obama outranked McCain on seven and tied him on the other three. McCain did not outrank Obama on any of the 10 measures of leadership, McKee said.
 
Here are McKee’s leadership rankings and scores. Has he got it right? How would you judge the two presidential candidates?
 
1 - Great leaders run their businesses with purpose, clearly knowing their values, goals and objectives. Obama beats McCain.
 
2 - Great leaders help others to succeed. Obama beats McCain.
 
3 - Great leaders give back to the community. Obama-McCain tie.
 
4 - Great leaders are willing and able to overcome daunting obstacles to achieve their goals. Obama-McCain tie.
 
5 - Great leaders are also great listeners. Obama beats McCain.
 
6 - Great leaders appreciate face-to-face dialogue. Obama beats McCain.
 
7 - Great leaders are honest and ethical. Obama beats McCain.
 
8 - Great leaders understand the difference between power and force. Obama beats McCain.
 
9 - Great leaders excel in difficult environments and get results. Obama-McCain tie.
 
10 - Great leaders continually upgrade their skills. Obama beats McCain.

Click here for more Reuters 2008 campaign coverage.

Photo credit: Top: Reuters/Tami Chappell (Obama speaks in Powder Springs, Georgia, on Tuesday). Bottom: Reuters/Jonathan Ernst (McCain addresses Latin American citizens group in Washington on Tuesday)