There is a great deal of justifiable anger being expressed at both the DNC’s and MoveOn.org’s television ads attacking John McCain. You can read some terrific articles posted in the past few days at Hot Air, Flopping Aces and GOP.com. William Teach of McCain Blogs has a particularly good piece on how FactCheck.org thoroughly deconstructs the DNC ad as distorted and misleading.

What does have me confused are the expressions of surprise. I mean, what did we expect? One unfortunate truth about negative ads is they tend to work and as the Chicago Tribune reports this anti-McCain ad appears to be no different.

Any political media strategist will tell you that you have to run an ad with a positive message seven to ten times more often than a negative one to have the same impact. So, if you are DNC Chairman Howard Dean or one of his puppet masters over at MoveOn.org what would you do?

Let’s remember that as The Hill recently pointed out, Dean runs the only Democratic organization that is failing to out-raise its Republican counterpart. The democrats in general hold huge advantages in the upcoming election but of course, Dean has a rather glorious history of snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. As it is the cash strapped DNC has to beg its members to send donations to keep its ads on the air. They have two brutally flawed candidates who are spending millions pointing out each others flaws and tearing each other apart in the process. Of course no one is surprised by the tactics of the Hillary Clinton campaign. It would take a heretofore unseen level of political naiveté to “believe” that a South Side Chicago Democrat like Barak Obama wouldn’t go negative despite all his promises to the contrary.

It is called “framing the narrative” and “defining your opponent before he/she can define themselves.” It is also called Politics 101. The narratives that the Democrats and their willing accomplices in the Main Stream Media are going with are 1) A third Bush term, 2) Continuing an unpopular and in their minds unwinnable war, (Actually Iraq is one battle in a much wider war) and 3) We are in a recession and John McCain doesn’t have the economic expertise to dig us out.

Those three elements of the democrat’s campaign against McCain are a vivid reminder of the truth of Ronald Reagan’s famous line “It’s not that liberals are ignorant. It is that so little of what they know is true.” Each is demonstrably false. My favorite is that we are in a recession when we have yet to have even a single quarter of falling GDP much less two in a row.

That the democrats are going to attack McCain and lie to do it isn’t really news or even noteworthy although I believe explaining it and putting it into some perspective may be.

So I think the more interesting question is “What should the McCain Campaign response be? There is a fair amount of debate about that. Pennsylvania political activist and pundit, Stephen Maloney has a very well written if not particularly complimentary post “The Battle For McCain’s Soul” over at his blog. Jeffrey Lord over at the American Spectator weighs in with “What if William Ayers Was Black.”

One of the problems the McCain Campaign has is a lack of an opponent which it sorely needs. Any campaign both financially and rhetorically has a finite amount of bullets it can fire and spending either of them on a candidate your campaign will never run against is of questionable value. I am guessing that both the McCain Campaign and the RNC will come out swinging once they have a target. Since both have graduate degrees in political strategy I am confident that will not forget the lessons of Politics 101. They will clearly seek to define their opponent. Of course that begs the question “How much worse do you have to make Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama look?”

However, I don’t think McCain will go negative. Will he and his campaign forcefully defend against attacks from the DNC, MoveOn and the eventual Democratic Nominee? Absolutely, but I doubt you will see an NCGOP type of ad over at JohnMcCaindotCom at YouTube.

The McCain narrative is “Service to America” and I think John McCain believes that type of campaigning would be in fact a dis-service to America. Strategically it lowers the level of campaigning to a point where I don’t think the McCain team wants to go. In Politics 102 you learn “You can’t throw mud without getting yourself dirty.”

I remember with glee when the Mastercard Moment when Clinton opened the leadership debate with her now infamous “It’s 3 am” ad. Perhaps Hillary wants to debate McCain on character. I doubt it. Perhaps Obama wants to challenge McCain on experience or in light of Obama’s dubious associations both past and present, judgment. Well, not so much.

One of my favorite movies is “An American President.” In one particularly memorable scene, President Alan Shepard (Michael Douglas) is talking with his Chief Of Staff and former Campaign Manager (Martin Sheen). He asks Sheen “If Mary (his wife) hadn’t died, do you think we could have won the character debate?” Sheen replies “I don’t know but it is a campaign I would have loved to have seen.”

The DNC, MoveOn.org and the eventual nominee will attack McCain ruthlessly. I think John McCain will continue to be the adult in the room. It is a campaign I would love to see.