That’s the McCain advice as to how a candidate should run his campaing, and in the context of negative attacks. As is widely known and reported, all of John McCain’s ads are negative lately, and as is clear, Barack Obama is taking McCain’s advice, which he even features in an ad. Yup, he said John McCain is right, again. This time John McCain was right in 2000, before he flip flopped and became the King of Negativity here in 2008. Here is the video of the ad and the words of John McCain, from Nicholas Graham at Huffington Post:

MCCAIN: “Uh, I, I just have to rely on the good judgment of the voters not to buy into these negative attack ads. Sooner or later, people are going to figure out if all you run is negative attack ads you don’t have much of a vision for the future or you’re not ready to articulate it.”

As John McCain’s home state newspaper, the Arizona Republicn notes, McCain has said many times he is not going to take the low road, at least in the past and up until several moths ago, but he’s taking that road now, and the AZ Republic warns McCain’s strategy of all negative all the time might backfire for him. (Where have they been the last two months?) McCain is simply not respecting the voters, the real people who make the decisions, whether on Main Street or on some back road. Indeed, he’s not even respecting average people when they ask him questions, even in a live debate viewed by scores of millions of people in this country. Remember McCain’s response to Oliver Clark, the black man who asked about the bailout crisis at the Nashville debate? Here’s the line that sticks out, from the CNN transcript:

But you know, one of the real catalysts, really the match that lit this fire was Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. I’ll bet you, you may never even have heard of them before this crisis.

That line hit me at the time as a bit condescending. Now we know the full story, that it likely was condescending, and that Oliver Clark is a bit miffed. Here’s Oliver Clark, quoted by Michael Levine of MSNBC:

How did I feel about Sen. McCain stating “You probably never heard of Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac before this.”

Well Senator, I actually did. I like to think of myself as a fairly intelligent person. I have a bachelor degree in Political Science from Tennessee State, so I try to keep myself up to date with current affairs. I have a Master degree in Legal Studies from Southern Illinois University, a few years in law school, and I am currently pursuing a Master in Public Administration from the University of Memphis. In defense of the Senator from Arizona I would say he is an older guy, and may have made an underestimation of my age. Honest mistake. However, it could be because I am a young African-American male. Whatever the case may be it was somewhat condescending regardless of my age to make an assumption regarding whether I was knowledgeable about Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

This is more than condescension. It is blowback in a large sense, the consequence of flip flopping on core moral principles. Every politician says he trusts the voters, and John McCain has made that a theme of his public life. Now he not only doesn’t trust the voters enough to run negative ads 24/7, but he doesn’t even trust a voter face-to-face.

Hey, but maybe if Oliver Clark was a white guy McCain wouldn’t have said what he did. Or, heaven forbid, maybe McCain remarked about Clark’s lack of knowledge as a relection of McCain himself not knowing? OK, I won’t go that far. McCain’s disdain for Obama showing in his disdain for voters. That’s clear. The cause of his disdain being ignorance of what he assumes the voter to be ignorant of? I won’t go there. McCain is ignorant, though. He is ignorant if he thinks voters will ignore him condescending to them.