(cross posted at kickin it with cg and motley moose)

A gunman, reportedly an immigrant from Vietnam, took hostages and opened fire in a U.S. immigration center in New York yesterday. 13 people were killed. The man later killed himself.

After the incident, Pakistani Taliban militant leader Baituallah Mehsud claimed credit for the attack.  Reuters reports:

"Pakistani Taliban militant leader Baituallah Mehsud claimed on Saturday responsibility for an attack on a U.S. immigration center in New York state in which 13 people were killed.

"'I accept responsibility. They were my men. I gave them orders in reaction to U.S. drone attacks,' Mehsud told by telephone from an undisclosed location.

Reports claim the FBI have ruled out the Taliban's responsibility in the attack and a Fox Pakistani security analyst "dismissed Mehsud's claim as a publicity stunt." 

What do you think?

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One of the more maddening things for me during the primary was the persistence of the myth that Obama didn't go negative on Hillary Clinton. The reality was that there was an ongoing concerted effort, albeit rather subtle and largely under the radar, to portray Clinton as someone who would "do or say anything to win", the subtext, of course, being "she's a liar." The beauty of the attack from Obama's standpoint was that people already had a pre-conceived notion in their head about Clinton along those lines so it didn't seem like an "attack", it just seemed like he was saying what people thought they already knew to be true.

Obama has been doing the same thing against McCain with the whole "erratic" and "confused" frame. Here, Obama is tapping into people's concerns about McCain's age without actually going there but is basing it on McCain's own behavior, so it doesn't come off as an attack (although the media is certainly acting as though the use of the word "erratic" is somehow equivalent to Palin's use of the word "terrorist.") This is the brilliance of Team Obama's message machine: they subtly amplify a pre-existing narrative (much as Bush did in 00 against Gore and in 04 against Kerry) and let most of the association take place in the mind of the voter or, as with Claire "Best Surrogate Ever" McCaskill on FNS yesterday, out of the mouth of a surrogate.

Where Obama excels at this, the McCain team is floundering. Just check out these attacks McCain is trying against Obama. Does any of this ring the least bit true? What world have these guys been living in?

Via Marc Ambinder:

What Senator Obama says today and what he has done in the past are often two different things. He has often changed his positions in this campaign, and the best way to determine where he would really take this country is to examine where he has tried to take it in the past. ....

Even after he refused to lift a finger to prevent this crisis, when the crisis hit, he was missing in action. He didn't start making calls to round up votes until after the rescue bill failed in the House and the markets crashed. We continue to see the price of delay today as the markets continue to fall. Today the DOW has fallen below 10,000. And yet, members of his own party said they felt no pressure to vote for the bill. Why didn't Senator Obama work to pass this bill from the start? Why did he let it fail and drag out this crisis for a full week before doing a thing to help pass it?

Umm, really? Does this seem like anything approaching how the last two weeks went down? And as Ambinder notes, it's fairly absurd to paint Obama as "a mystery, a liar, complicit in the economic crisis and an unaccomplished naïf, at all the same time." Not only does it not ring true but it's unfocused to say the least.

And then there was this, via TPM:

My opponent has invited serious questioning by announcing a few weeks ago that he would quote -- "take off the gloves." Since then, whenever I have questioned his policies or his record, he has called me a liar.

Rather than answer his critics, Senator Obama will try to distract you from noticing that he never answers the serious and legitimate questions he has been asked. But let me reply in the plainest terms I know. I don't need lessons about telling the truth to American people. And were I ever to need any improvement in that regard, I probably wouldn't seek advice from a Chicago politician.

My opponent's touchiness every time he is questioned about his record should make us only more concerned.

Obama is "touchy?" Which Obama is that, exactly? The thrust of the speech is "Who is the real Barack Obama" to portray him as, as Greg Sargent points out, "an alien in our midst," but they never succeeded at framing him as this dangerous other that McCain is now trying to hammer home. The problem for McCain is that his attacks are directly contradicted by what everyone sees and hears from Barack Obama, not coinciding with them as they need to in order to stick.

Update [2008-10-6 21:16:9 by Todd Beeton]:Oh yeah, and don't forget "Barack's angry." More like "not angry enough."

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This is my preferred response to McCain's attacks.

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Over the last few days the McCain camp has started to get desperate with all the good news for Obama. So what does a campaign run by the architect of negative campaigning do?

Do some good 'ole negative campaigning of course. Here's a recap.

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Here is a very interesting study from Poblano at 538:

http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/05/incoming.html

In it, he uses press releases from five sources to attempt to gauge which candidates have been attacking each other the most, and which have been suffering the brunt of most attacks.

As the front-runner, it's not surprising that Obama has been the target of the most, but it is strange (heartening?) to see how few "attack" press releases his campaign has issued.

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