Read the transcript here. Chris Wallace interviews McCain's campaign manager, Rick Davis.
WALLACE: According to a recent poll — and let's put it up — people rate Obama's ads as positive by a margin of 38 percent to 13. But they view McCain's ads as negative 31 percent to 19.
Mr. Davis, why is the McCain campaign spending so much time and so much of its money attacking Obama?
DAVIS: Well, first of all, I don't think that we are spending that much time and money attacking Obama. And I would say Obama is spending exactly the same amount of time attacking us and, frankly, probably more money.
Obama started negative campaigning on John McCain long before we started punching back, and I think a lot of our effort is really to get back into this game, try and galvanize some of the public attention back onto this race, make sure everybody understands there's two people in this race, not just one, and I think we've been successful in doing that.
And you know, look. You could read a lot of polls right now, and it's August before a presidential election, and I really don't think that these polls are going to make a bit of difference come September.
WALLACE: All right. Let's take a look at one of your campaign's recent ads. Here it is.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
NARRATOR: Life in the spotlight must be grand. But for the rest of us, times are tough. Obama voted to raise taxes on people making just $42,000.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
WALLACE: Mr. Davis, especially that last sentence, isn't that misleading?
DAVIS: Nothing misleading about it. Barack Obama voted for a budget resolution that would have increased taxes on people, families, making $42,000. What's misleading about that?
WALLACE: Well, in fact, it only would be single people making $42,000. It would be families making over $60,000. But Obama — as you say, he voted for a non-binding budget resolution that overall talked about doing away with the Bush tax cuts.
In fact, he says, that's not his tax plan, that he supports a middle-class tax cut. And I want to put something up on the screen. The non-partisan Tax Policy Center says someone making $37,000 a year under Obama's plan would get a tax cut of $892. Under McCain's plan, they get a tax cut of $113.
DAVIS: Look, Obama wants to take away the current tax cuts that people now have. That includes a $1,000 child tax credit for people exactly in that category. It means doing away with the marriage penalty and many other things.
In the short period of time Barack Obama has been in the United States Senate, less than 300 working days, he has voted for 90 tax increases.
Now, we could have an ad on every tax increase he's voted on every single day between now and the election and still not get them all in. So I don't think anybody's going to question — who's going to raise your taxes as president of the United States? Barack Obama.
Who's going to cut your taxes and hold down spending as president of the United States? John McCain.
No comments:
Post a Comment