John McCain: The Panamanian president Americans have been waiting for?

Everyone focuses on the message this campaign ad might say about Obama...

The voice-over then concludes, “John McCain: The American president Americans have been waiting for.”

It’s that last line that’s probably the most provocative.

Obama, of course, delivered a speech on Super Tuesday that said, “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” The McCain ad, meanwhile, argued that McCain is the “American president Americans have been waiting for.”

So, why use the word “American” twice in the same sentence? Media consultants, especially when creating presidential campaign ads for the general election, don’t waste so much as a syllable. The sentence would have sounded just fine if it said, “John McCain: The president Americans have been waiting for.” But the campaign wanted to add that one extra word.

Michael Crowley noted:

That’s an awfully conspicuous formulation when your opponent has been accused of being unpatriotic and of murky foreign origin. All the more so given that it echoes Obama’s line, “we’re the ones we’ve been waiting for.” Am I reading too much into it?

I don’t think so.

Maybe... BUT they forget the fact that McCain has so many campaign flaws that need to be reformed in the eyes of the republican wing nuts. Stuff like the fact that John Sidney McCain was born in Panama and, theoretically, may not legally be eligible to become president of the USA, nor how his birth in his native homeland of Panama plays out to anti-immigrant voters:

Can Foreign Born John McCain Be President?

The fact that John McCain was born in a foreign land has even the McCain campaign scrambling for legal cover:

Mr. McCain’s likely nomination as the Republican candidate for president and the happenstance of his birth in the Panama Canal Zone in 1936 are reviving a musty debate that has surfaced periodically since the founders first set quill to parchment and declared that only a “natural-born citizen” can hold the nation’s highest office.

The phrase “natural born” was in early drafts of the Constitution. Scholars say notes of the Constitutional Convention give away little of the intent of the framers. Its origin may be traced to a letter from John Jay to George Washington, with Jay suggesting that to prevent foreigners from becoming commander in chief, the Constitution needed to “declare expressly” that only a natural-born citizen could be president.

Ms. Duggin and others who have explored the arcane subject in depth say legal argument and basic fairness may indeed be on the side of Mr. McCain, a longtime member of Congress from Arizona. But multiple experts and scholarly reviews say the issue has never been definitively resolved by either Congress or the Supreme Court.

Just some food for thought as conservatives seem to be on their way to nominating the first Panamanian born candidate for President of the United States of America. Not that he is likely to win, but I wonder if McCain is related to Manuel Noriega?

There is always the possibility that this message is supposed to be some kind of message to their own base as well as the possible undertones directed towards Obama in this typical GOP type campaign ad.