LENGTH: 30 seconds.
AIRING: The campaign would not disclose where this ad will air other than to say in "key states" where McCain already is running commercials. That lack of information raises questions about how often this ad will be seen by voters or whether it was simply made to generate news stories and publicity.
SCRIPT: Announcer: "The attacks on Governor Palin have been called 'completely false' ... 'misleading.' And, they've just begun. The Journal reports Obama 'air-dropped a mini-army of 30 lawyers, investigators and opposition researchers' into Alaska to dig dirt on Governor Palin. As Obama drops in the polls, he'll try to destroy her. Obama's 'politics of hope?' Empty words." McCain: "I'm John McCain and I approved this message."
KEY IMAGES: Palin and Obama are shown, as well as what appears to be a pack of wolves running through brush. McCain also is shown.
ANALYSIS:
This ad takes the truth and twists it.
The campaign asserts that "attacks on Governor Palin have been called 'completely false' and 'misleading" — and uses pictures of Obama to suggest that the Democrat has been spreading lies about Palin.
To back up its claim, McCain's team points to comments made by prominent Democrats, including some with links to Obama's campaign, incorrectly aligning Palin with Pat Buchanan and a fringe political group in which some members supported Alaska's secession from the United States.
More prominently, McCain's ad quotes a nonpartisan online organization called factcheck.org.
But the group wasn't referring to Obama when it talked of false and misleading attacks. Rather, it referenced Internet rumors, saying: "We've been flooded for the past few days with queries about dubious Internet postings and mass e-mail messages making claims about McCain's running mate, Gov. Palin. We find that many are completely false or misleading."
At the same time, the McCain ad takes Obama's campaign to task over a Wall Street Journal column that said operatives were going to "dig into her record and background." The ad distorts that by saying "dig dirt."
Obama's campaign has called the Journal report "false," and Obama spokesman Josh Earnest said in a conference call that "there are no Obama or DNC staffers or researchers that were air-dropped into Alaska." He declined to answer whether Democratic lawyers in Alaska had been recruited to do research on Palin in the state.
What McCain doesn't say in the ad is that Republicans also have amassed reams of research on Obama and his running mate Joe Biden after going through their records and backgrounds. This "opposition research" is the norm in modern political campaigns, not that a viewer would know that from the commercial.
It's certainly the case that Obama has criticized Palin, saying that she and McCain don't deserve the label of change agents and are spewing "empty words."
But it remains to be seen whether such criticisms have "just begun" as the ad asserts, and whether Obama really will "try to destroy" Palin as he "drops in polls." Neither of those assertions are drawn from facts; McCain's campaign simply is saying what it believes will happen without offering voters any proof.
McCain's ad claims that Obama is spreading misleading information about Palin, yet it was unveiled one day after the GOP ticket itself released its own commercial that stretched the facts.
That ad said that Obama's only education accomplishment was legislation to teach sex education to kindergartners. Obama voted for the sex education bill in committee in 2003 as an Illinois states senator, but he was not the sponsor of that legislation. The bill also would have required age-appropriate information in schools and would have allowed parents to pull their children from sex education classes if they wished. It never became law.
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