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...extended interview with TIME, Davis detailed what might have been in the campaign ad war - and what self-censorship the McCain staff imposed on themselves regarding the issue of race. For most of the campaign, Davis functioned as McCain's silent partner. While journalists hounded McCain's senior campaign aides, people like Steve Schmidt, Mark Salter and Rick Davis (no relation), Fred Davis worked in the shadows. He designed and often wrote the scripts for the most stinging of McCain's spots - the Web ad that depicted Obama as a messiah, the kindergarten ad that suggested Obama wanted to teach...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Anti-Obama Campaign That Didn't Happen | 11/24/2008 | See Source »

...favorite ad of the campaign was as simple as it could be," Davis said. "And it started out something like, 'Long before the world knew of John McCain or Barack Obama, one of them spent five years in a hellhole because he refused early release to honor his fellow prisoners, while the other one wouldn't walk out of a church after 20 years of the guy spewing hatred towards America.' And the last line was, 'Character matters, especially when no one is listening.' " The ad never ran, however, because McCain ruled the topic of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Anti-Obama Campaign That Didn't Happen | 11/24/2008 | See Source »

Good advertising men are almost always mischiefmakers at heart, the sort who don't mind a little confrontation and who revel in a bit of controversy. And so Davis is wistful at the missed opportunities of the McCain campaign. "I made a list once, which no one will ever see, of all the reasons that my hands were tied on this campaign," he says. "And I've never had a list this long." One of his biggest struggles, Davis says, was to come up with negative spots against a historic, groundbreaking candidate without stepping on taboos...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Anti-Obama Campaign That Didn't Happen | 11/24/2008 | See Source »

Davis says that concern about race played a major role in the entire aesthetic of McCain's ads. The photographs of Obama that the ads used, for instance, which often showed Obama elongated and smiling, were carefully selected, he recalls. "We chose them with only one thing in mind, and that is to not make them bad pictures because bad pictures would be seen as racist," Davis says. "How many shots in their ads did they use a John McCain [photo] looking decent and smiling?" He says the campaign also agonized over the music in the ads, paying special care...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Anti-Obama Campaign That Didn't Happen | 11/24/2008 | See Source »

Nevertheless, the McCain campaign was unable to escape the charge that it was playing the race card. An Associated Press analysis called the campaign's invocations of the once violent 1960s radical Ayers "racially tinged" because they evoked the word terrorist. McCain was also accused of playing on race for running an ad that highlighted Obama's relationship with Franklin Raines, a former executive at Fannie Mae who is black. Says Davis: "I never saw anybody play the race card but the Obama campaign...

Author: /time Magazine | Title: The Anti-Obama Campaign That Didn't Happen | 11/24/2008 | See Source »

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