By Mike Glover
PHOENIX (AP) --If you think you’ve heard this line of attack before, there’s a reason.
Republican John McCain’s latest TV spot is playing off Hillary Rodham Clinton’s best-known ad against Barack Obama to heighten any concerns that Obama isn’t ready to take a 3 a.m. phone call that could signal a crisis demanding judgment and experience.
The McCain ad debuted Tuesday, just hours before Clinton was to address the Democratic National Convention in Denver. While she was expected to repeat her post-primary support for Obama’s candidacy in an effort to bring her supporters to his side, McCain’s campaign didn’t want voters to forget that she had once considered McCain to be more experienced.
Opening with a scene lifted from Clinton’s old ad, the McCain spot then switches to scenes of war, missiles and hooded gunmen as an announcer says: “Uncertainty. Dangerous aggression. Rogue nations. Radicalism.” Clinton herself is shown saying: “I know Sen. Mc Cain has a lifetime of experience that he will bring to the White House. And Sen. Obama has a speech he gave in 2002.”
The announcer adds: “Hillary’s right. John McCain for president.”
The 30-second spot was running in Ohio, West Virginia and Wisconsin as well as in Denver.
McCain ads using Clinton’s words against Obama drew the New York senator’s ire on Monday. She told delegates from her state, “I’m Hillary Clinton and I do not approve that message.”
McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said Tuesday that Clinton laid the groundwork for making the case that Obama, a first-term Illinois senator, wasn’t ready to lead the nation. McCain will spend much of the fall campaign fleshing out that argument, Bounds said.
Clinton’s commercial, which aired as she struggled to stop Obama’s march to the nomination, was designed to reinforce the message that her years as first lady and in the Senate gave her the experience that’s needed to govern in a troubled world . The ad was stark and designed to be frightening, using the image of children asleep in their beds and a telephone ringing in the middle of the night.
“It’s 3 a.m. and your children are safe and asleep,” the announcer said. “Who do you want answering the phone?” In answer to that question, the ad ended with a shot of Clinton at work.
Review: Writer-Director Andrea Arnold’s “Bird”
"Is it too real for ya?" blares in the background of Andrea Arnold's latest film, "Bird," a 12-year-old Bailey (Nykiya Adams) rides with her shirtless, tattoo-covered dad, Bug (Barry Keoghan), on his electric scooter past scenes of poverty in working-class Kent.
The song's question — courtesy of the Irish post-punk band Fontains D.C. — is an acute one for "Bird." Arnold's films ( "American Honey," "Fish Tank") are rigorous in their gritty naturalism. Her fiction films — this is her first in eight years — tend toward bleak, hand-held verité in rough-and-tumble real-world locations. Her last film, "Cow," documented a mother cow separated from her calf on a dairy farm.
Arnold specializes in capturing souls, human and otherwise, in soulless environments. A dream of something more is tantalizing just out of reach. In "American Honey," peace comes to Star (Sasha Lane) only when she submerges underwater.
In "Bird," though, this sense of otherworldly possibility is made flesh, or at least feathery. After a confusing night, Bailey awakens in a field where she encounters a strange figure in a skirt ( Franz Rogowski ) who arrives, like Mary Poppins, with a gust a wind. His name, he says, is Bird. He has a soft sweetness that doesn't otherwise exist in Bailey's hardscrabble and chaotic life.
She's skeptical of him at first, but he keeps lurking about, hovering gull-like on rooftops. He cranes his neck now and again like he's watching out for Bailey. And he does watch out for her, helping Bailey through a hard coming of age: the abusive boyfriend (James Nelson-Joyce) of her mother (Jasmine Jobson); her half brother (Jason Buda) slipping into vigilante violence; her father marrying a new girlfriend.
The introduction of surrealism has... Read More