This is a very poorly done ad -- especially the music. It even supports Palin's bogus claim that she opposed the Bridge to Nowhere.

It says she opposed the earmark and then kept the money.

I think the text moves around to quickly and is hard to follow.

The heart monitor thingie over top of McCorpse as he reaches up is sort of funny though.

Even good readers will have a hard time assimilating the rapidly disappearing text. The text content will completely miss the low information voters. The ad should have been narrated.

Did Karl Rove make this ad for them just to minimize its potential impact?

The music is a poor choice if one wants to aim at low information swing voters, some of whom will be borderline racists.

The production value on the ad stinks, but that picture of the heart monitor flat-lining and McCain floating away -- wow.  That's probably the loudest that I've laughed at a political ad this season.

I hope that the National Nurses Organizing Committee has done some research on the ad to make sure that it plays well with the target audience.  The ad though is thoroughly emasculating.  Potentially very effective because it reduces both McCain and Palin to objects of ridicule.  The mood is light, but it is still absolutely devastating.  

Whether the ad works really depends on who the target audience is.  The pool of undecideds is fairly small at this stage -- the ad clearly won't sway partisans one way or another.

I think there are a lot of people who think Palin is a nitwit, but haven't really thought about the idea of her being President.

The entire purpose of this ad might have been the heart monitor connection.

Who knows.  It might be effective.

yesterday and today to hold a couple of campaign events?

Iowa is not even in play. It seems to be a pointless place to spend two days of the month remaining in the campaign.

Unless--McCain took a quick trip in an unmarked charter plane to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota yesterday evening. McCain normally goes to the Mayo facility in Scottsdale, Arizona, but I wonder whether there is a specialist that he wanted to see in Rochester, MN, especially in view of his obvious physical decline in the last few weeks.

This is sheer speculation, but Iowa is simply not in play. McCain could at least have rationally spent a little campaign time in Minnesota, which is a long shot possibility for McCain/Palin this fall.

Going to Iowa as a diversion for an unpublicized trip to the Mayo Clinic in Rochester makes at least some sense. It might also explain McCain's seriously surly mood in his session with the editorial board at the Des Moines Daily Register this morning.

maybe he was hoping to get the Des Moines Register endorsement -- hoping that that would tilt votes.  Maybe it's a feint to attempt to get Obama to commit time in the state.

Maybe he's just lost his bearings.  Maybe he did need to go to the Mayo Clinic -- although that would strike me as a hard trip to keep the wraps on.

But spending two days in an already lost Iowa just makes no political sense at this stage of his campaign, so I was just looking for another possible explanation.

Karl Rove had Dubya campaigning in California right before election day in 2000. If a few hundred votes in Florida had gone the other way, that certainly wouldn't have caused Rove to be remembered as a genius.