Thursday, November 12, 2009

Opinion

Michael Barone

Obama's Campaign Is More Negative Than McCain's

September 19, 2008 12:44 PM ET | Michael Barone | Permanent Link | Print

As Byron York writes in National Review Online, the McCain ad on sex education, denounced as a lie by so many liberal commentators, is accurate. The bill Obama voted for included the following phrase:

Each class or course in comprehensive sex education in any of grades K through 12 shall include instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV.

The liberal critics may believe that it's troglodytic to oppose teaching kindergarteners how to avoid sexually transmitted diseases, but I doubt that most American voters do.

Interestingly, despite the meme of liberal commentary that McCain is running a scandalously negative campaign, the Obama campaign is running more negative ads than the McCain campaign.

Here is Amir Taheri's latest article arguing that Obama undercut administration policy in his meetings with Iraq's foreign minister. Chief source: Iraq's foreign minister. Taheri's claims have been bolstered by contemporaneous press accounts, as blogger Tom Maguire demonstrates. Mainstream media seems predictably uninterested in this issue.

Tags: advertising | presidential election 2008 | Barack Obama | John McCain | campaign advertising | campaign strategy

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Michael Barone is a senior writer for U.S.News & World Report and principal coauthor of The Almanac of American Politics. He has written for many publications—including the Economist and the New York Times.

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