McCain Chastises Supporters who Believed His Ads

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Political campaigns have gone over the edge this year. Sending out Sarah Palin to say that Senator Obama “pals around with domestic terrorists” and showing ad after ad creating artificially strong links between Senator Obama and William Ayers is bad for the country and is representative of the politics of division. It is wrong, and it drives wedges between good Americans. It is fear mongering for political gain and it works. If you need evidence of how well it works, just listen to some of the comments being shouted out at McCain and Palin rallies by their supporters who buy into these misleading representations. Look at the emails, blogs, and ranting articles published even here at Digital Journal. Creating this atmosphere of fear and using Barack Obama’s middle name as an epithet because it sounds foreign is not a benign act. It is shameful, self-serving, and cowardly.

All of this has been done under the direction of the McCain presidential campaign. Only now it seems that John McCain is surprised that his supporters actually believe the garbage he runs in his political ads. In a first step at returning to decency, John McCain attempted to set a couple of his supporters straight while on the campaign trail Friday. I applaud this effort, but it is a shallow and insincere effort if the ads that fanned this frenzy are continuing to run. If Sarah Palin is allowed to continue her ranting about friends of domestic terrorists in the White House, then we’ll have the true measure of John McCain’s repentance.

As Americans, we have differences of opinion, and that’s healthy. When those differences of opinion turn into false and misleading personal attacks, when they spread fear among our fellow citizens, when they border on inciting people to violence, then we have stepped over the line. I applaud Senator McCain for correcting some of the misinformation he has sowed, but he needs to correct the underlying cause of that misinformation and pull the dirty ads, and keep better control over the people in his campaign.