McCain Ad Hits Obama on Hospital Snub

The McCain campaign, seeking to take advantage of the controversy surrounding Sen. Barack Obama's canceled visit to the Landstuhl military hospital while in Germany this week, released a new television spot titled "Troops." The ad takes Obama to task for the cancellation and hits him for his lax oversight of Afghanistan as chairman of a Congressional committee charged with keeping tabs on the war effort there.

The controversy over the hospital snub is causing Obama's week-long foreign trip to end on a sour note, and McCain is using the opening to raise questions about Obama's readiness to be commander-in-chief. The ad will run in battleground states beginning immediately.

ANNOUNCER: Barack Obama never held a single Senate hearing on Afghanistan.

He hadn't been to Iraq in years.

He voted against funding our troops.

And now, he made time to go to the gym, but canceled a visit with wounded troops.

Seems the Pentagon wouldn't allow him to bring cameras.

John McCain is always there for our troops.

McCain. Country first.

JOHN MCCAIN: I'm John McCain and I approve this message.

This is a hard-hitting ad of the kind that the McCain campaign has thus far been averse to airing. No doubt the campaign sees an opportunity in Obama's decision to forgo his planned visit to the hospital at a U.S. air base in Germany. It is the kind of mistake that can be very damaging to a political campaign because it is almost universally and easily understood as wrong by the general public, and it seems to paint the candidate as uncaring. If this ad gets significant airplay, it could help McCain cancel out all of the good press earned by Sen. Obama on his trip.