McCain's Message: Blame Obama

I agree with Kevin Drum: John McCain is getting really desperate if he expects people to believe that Barack Obama is singlehandedly responsible for current gasoline prices.

"Who can you thank for rising prices at the pump?" the narrator asked. We then hear Barack Obama's name chanted repeatedly.

The Iraq war, energy companies rigging rates, years of bad policy or McCain's terms in the Senate have nothing to do with gas prices. It's all Obama's fault.

Update: PolitiFact rates the McCain ad as entirely false.

The main implication of the ad is that the ban on some offshore drilling — a ban that McCain has long opposed, more explicitly lately than in the past — has contributed to rising prices, and since Obama supports it, it is fair to blame him for it.

The last part is highly dubious. Obama has only been in the U.S. Senate since 2005, and the congressional moratorium prohibiting oil and gas leasing on most of the outer continental shelf dates to 1982.

Granted, Congress has renewed it every year since. But there was also a presidential order banning oil exploration off the coasts from 1990, when the first President Bush issued it, until July 14, 2008, when his son lifted it.

McCain needs to focus on more on what he is going to do for the country. McCain can't define a message when he keeps flip-flopping. This election is about voters that or for and against Obama. McCain was the Republican that ran the least incompetent campaign. No one will mistake him for the second-coming of Ronald Reagan.