It's about time. But there should be such a shot in EVERY Obama ad from here on out, and there needs to be several of the famous hug picture.

McCain has other issues that make him vulnerable - like not having the first clue what he is talking about much of the time. No wonder he is such buddies with Guiliani.

Mr Expereince has tons of footage out there of him blathering on embarrassingly, being corrected, etc. Hillary undercut her message of competence every day with that mess of a campaign and McCain is doing the same thing with his relentless idiocy.  Why shouldn't this be used?  It's perfectly valid.  The man is a 71 year old war hero airhead.  How is this going to help this country again?

Bush III should only be part of the attack, not the whole thing. This ad should just be the appetizer.  

Linking McCain to Bush, substantiated by numbers and populist bogeymen. Or: playing the ace from the top of the deck. Finally.

Finally.  Finally!  They need to run this ad constantly and ones even more biting.  For crying out loud, the Obama camp has a huge war chest.  Why aren't they spending it?  And Miceelf is right, they need to show the McCain/Bush hug in every ad, and plastered on billboards all over the US.  Remind everyone how McCain=Bush.

More.  More.  More.  I got a fever... and the only prescription... is more Dubya.

Which leads to an interesting question, prnoonan. Who would make a better president: Bush or a cowbell?

Agree with miceelf; although I think they need to start pulling out footage of McCain lauding himself for doing "everything in [his] power to help get Bush elected in '00 and in '04". THAT is the money shot Obama needs. To make it even better, cut the announcer and turn the volume on the mixer up higher so every can hear the earnestness in his voice.

I want to see Obama elected, and if this works, I guess I'll put up with it.

But let's be real amongst ourselves.  The cost of gas is killing American consumers because American consumers are pretty dumb about how they spend their money.

I burned 300 gallons of gasoline in my car in the last 12 months.  At $2/gallon premium over a couple of years ago, that's an extra $600.00/year.

Now, if you're working minimum wage, that's real money, no question.  But most working class people where I live, it's still less than they spend on cigarettes, coffee and lottery tickets in the gas station convenience store - things from which they derive no benefit, and significant detriment.

Of course, most of them also are actually paying 3 times that, because they drive way more than they need to, and when they do, they do it in something that gets 15 mpg, instead of the 41 I get.

But those are all choices they made or make.  Bad choices.

This reminds me of the glory days in PA; those were some beautiful ads: cut Clinton down to size and never misrepresented a single position or called her a single dirty name.

I guess that is one of the reason I sort of cringe when ads like this get lumped in with "attack ads"; Obama's "worst" ads have only had the slightest hint of the aspects I generally find detestable.

Of course, this ad cites CRP, and I generally hate it when candidates cite CRP; on the flip side, I would like to thank McCain's "rebuttal" pointing out that Obama has taken $400,000 in private donations. As we can see, the truth is Obama has only receive 20% of the donations McCain has received, which tells me that Obama is getting a lot of small donations from people who happen to be employed by an oil company, or subsidiary, while McCain is receiving sizable campaign contributions. I wonder how many of McCain's whales are Oil executives?

GSpinks: re your post on McCain's Bush episode - what I really liked was his deranged laughter, almost maniacal in its timber and tenor.

Kind of drives the message home, doesn't it?

Readers of the Post already know that campaign contributions from large oil companies fairly gushed into