The One

There has been a lot of chit chat on various blogs about the new McCain commercial called "the One". One line of thought, exemplified by Virginia Postrel's post here (which includes a link to the ad) emphasizes that the ad provides evidence of a sense of humor that has not previously been in evidence and which does a nice job of making McCain seem less old.

The other line of discussion concerns whether the ad doubles as a coded message to that subset of the Christian right who, apparently seriously, thinks that Obama is the anti-christ. It is hard for me to even type that without smirking but you can read more from the folks at Time magazine here. And you can read people making fun of the Time story here, here and here.

Unlike most people, or at least what most people say in public, I like negative campaign ads. First, they tend to be much more fun to watch than smary positive ads, which have too many flags and no substance. Second, unlike positive campaign ads, negative campaign ads have a positive externality, to the extent that they make viewers more cynical about the political class as a whole.