I saw John McCain’s latest television commercial on the Cotton Mouth Blog:

This ad will run on national cable networks and in Colorado, Iowa, Mississippi, Missouri, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Virginia and Wisconsin.

Did you catch that?

McCain is paying for television time in Mississippi, a state where George Bush beat John Kerry by 59 percent to 40 percent.

In May, DavidNYC laid out a scenario for how Barack Obama could win Mississippi. I thought that sounded fanciful, but as the Cotton Mouth Blog noted,

John McCain’s campaign doesn’t have enough money to spend in places he’s “not worried.”

In terms of content, this ad is mostly a standard introductory biographical piece. It presents McCain as a war hero in Vietnam and a maverick in the Senate, where he isn’t guided by polls and isn’t afraid to take on presidents and partisans, including in his own party.

The 60-second commercial takes a few not-so-subtle swipes at Obama. It opens with visuals of hippies as the voice-over says:

It was a time of uncertainty, hope and change. The Summer of Love. Half a world away, another kind of love–of country. John McCain.

Get it? “Hope and change” = dirty hippies. I doubt connecting those images with Obama is going to work, though. He was what, seven years old at the time? Anyway, he explicitly rejects the politics of the 1960s in his speeches.

Toward the end of the ad, the voice-over says:

John McCain doesn’t always tell us what we hope to hear. Beautiful words cannot make our lives better, but a man who has always put his country and her people before self, before politics, can.

Don’t hope for a better life. Vote for one. McCain.

I bolded the words that the voice-over speaks with special emphasis.

Can a commercial like this neutralize Obama’s message of “Yes we can” and the “politics of hope”? I didn’t find it convincing, but I’m obviously not the target audience.

What do you think?