Negative Campaigning During the Olympics

I go crazy for the Olympics.  Most of my close friends and family members know that if they need to reach me over the next three weeks, they’ll find me glued to a television.  I’m a complete sucker for all of the pomp and pageantry surrounding the Games, and I will admit that the Opening Ceremony blew me away despite my best efforts to treat China’s display with the scrutiny it deserves.

But the Summer Games aren’t the only major sensation that comes about every four years.  There’s an election on, if you haven’t heard, and the candidates are especially eager to target all of those patriotic viewers watching Michael Phelps et al bring home the gold.

A few weeks before the Olympics began, I came across this post (emphasis mine):

Conventional wisdom has held that neither candidate would pick his running mate during the Olympic Games, because once underway the Games would occupy the nation’s attention at the expense of political news. [...]

The vice presidential pick is big political news, but consider what the Obama campaign’s ideal scenario is: dozens and dozens of ads aimed at a national audience permitting the Democrats to define and frame the ticket on their own terms. Biographical spots, smiling running mates, optimistic, patriotic, flag-waving images, and no countering ads from the Republicans that define the ticket in negative terms. It’s a mass first impression of an optimistic, change ticket Obama would want to make, and almost a free field to make that impression (there are no reports of any McCain Olympic ad buy, and negative ads during the Olympics feel tonally off).

Of course, part of this scenario changed dramatically when McCain’s campaign upped the ante with $6 million (compared to Obama’s $5 million) in Olympics advertising.  But going into the Olympics I was convinced that this strategy could work and that no candidate would dare interrupt the free-flowing goodwill of the Olympics with attack ads.

Wrong.

Just remember Sunday night.  Michael Phelps and the American 4X100 Freestyle Relay team pull off perhaps the greatest come-from-behind victory in the history of Olympic swimming.  I was jumping up and down, yelling at my television…and I know I wasn’t the only one.  After the race, NBC cuts to a quick commercial.  This diary from DailyKos captures what happened next perfectly:

Cullen Jones thanking his mom… for Johnson and Johnson…
Morgan Freeman deconstructing the power of Michael Phelps… for Visa…
Barack Obama is scary… “I’m John McCain and I approved this message…”

My seven year old son said it all… “Why did John McCain want to spoil our excitement?”

There we were, riding a high of American pride and marveling at the accomplishments of our underdog victors…and here is the ad that we saw:

(For the sake of comparison, here’s the Obama ad that’s running on NBC during the Olympics:)

There’s an episode of Seinfeld where Jerry is upset that his dentist has converted to Judaism for the sole purpose (Jerry believes) of being able to tell jokes about Judaism with impunity.  Jerry “confesses” this to the dentist’s former priest, who asks “…and this offends you as a Jewish person?”  Jerry responds: “No, it offends me as a comedian!”

‘So,’ you might ask, ‘this offends you as an Obama supporter?’  No.  It offends me as a follower of both politics and (more importantly) the Olympics.  This strikes me as both a profoundly stupid strategy from the McCain campign (though I’m not going to lose any sleep over that) AND an insult to the positive atmosphere of the Olympic games.