political ads

For months now, Barack Obama has been saying in his campaign speeches that John McCain voted with President Bush 90% of the time, trying to convince voters that voting for McCain would be like voting for Bush again. Today on the radio, a local democratic candidate for congress was saying the same thing about his opponent, saying that he voted with Bush 80% of the time.

These seem like nice scare tactics since Bush's approval rating is so low, but throwing out a number like that doesn't tell us anything. Obama has voted along with Bush somewhere between 40 and 50% of the time, so if the 90% number is accurate, McCain and Obama have indeed disagreed on the contents of a large chunk of legislation. I wish in the debates, McCain (or even one of the moderators) would have called Obama on it and asked for a specific bill that came up for vote in the Senate where Obama and McCain voted differently. And then the two candidates could have explained why they voted the way they did and showed how their views on the actual issues differed.

But heaven forbid we actually hear substantive debate on specific issues in a presidential election. Instead the campaigns decide that they can throw a number at us, point at our currently unpopular president and try to scare us. Stop insulting us with scare tactics and meaningless statistics!