McCain followers were outraged on Monday after seeing Senator Obama's newest "attack ad." The ad shows progressions in time with products that anyone in the general public knows how to operate, i.e., the telephone, the record player, the rubix cube, and the computer in chronological order. Following this, the ad says McCain can't understand the economy, and that he favors tax cuts for large corporations. Then the ad says, "[he] doesn't know how to use a computer," and "[he] can't send an email."

This took McCain followers back. They believed the Obama campaign was taking a cheap shot at Senator McCain's disabilities from his POW days. That is, he is not capable of lifting his arms past his shoulders, and his hands tremble. Could the Obama campaign really have sunk that low?

Luckily for American politics, that is not the case. The McCain campaign could only hope that the ad would backfire like this. Most who have seen the ad contend that it was merely a shot at McCain's age. Like many popular programs such as The David Letterman Show, and SNL do, the Obama campaign was aiming to make McCain seem too old to be able to run the country. It's old news that if McCain were too win, he would be the oldest president ever sworn in, this at age seventy-three.

In comparison, an attack ad from the McCain campaign shows parallels between Obama's stardom and Britney Spears' and Paris Hilton's. The McCain camp put out an ad saying, "He [Obama] is the biggest celebrity in the world." They did this hoping to play on the public's perspective that Obama was simply too inexperienced to lead a nation. The ad goes on to say that Obama wants to raise taxes on electricity and how he opposes offshore drilling, which, in turn, increases dependence on foreign oil.

Attack ads are a consistently successful means of shaping public opinion. Americans can only hope that along the campaign trails all is fair, and that certain lines of civility are not crossed.

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