You be the judge.  The McCain campaign first asked the question in a web ad June 7:

“Is it OK to unconditionally meet with anti-American foreign leaders?”

Two months and millions of ad impressions later, once can now respond to that question with another:

For how long is it OK to let an insinuating display ad float out there unchallenged, unanswered in its own medium?

Related posts:

Recent Obama ads maintain positive track, Adoftheday.net (8/6)

Obama starts hitting back, too softly for some, Washingtonpost.com (8-6)

McCain: Gas tax ads, biography, Obama-Iranian comparison, Adoftheday.net (8/5)

McCain Pushed Iran Issue in June Web Ads, ClickZ.com, 7/31

Consider the broad list of domains (at right) where McCain’s Ahmadinejad ad has appeared since August 1.

Back in June, the McCain camp purchased 9.2 million estimated impressions of this ad, three times more than for their next biggest, a McCain bio.

The dilemma facing Obama was first framed regarding presidential politics 20 years ago, by reporter Mark Hertsgaard in his book of media criticism, “On Bended Knee.”  During the 1984 presidential campaign, CBS journalist Leslie Stahl deduced that the message of one of her hard-hitting TV pieces on Reagan Administration policy was never heard by the audience the way she intended.  The reason was all the pretty pictures.  Reason?  The footage that accompanied her hard-hitting voiceover was the relentlessly positive, upbeat, stagecraft that was essentially produced for CBS by the Reagan advance team. On television, the pictures mattered more than the words.

Conversely, it’s now widely accepted that the campaign of the Democratic nominee running to succeed Reagan foundered, in part, because Michael Dukakis did not absorb this lesson and adapt it to the reality of attack politics.

The negative attacks on Dukakis were driven home by compelling images that gave them wings:  Willie Horton’s mug shot.  A revolving door of convicts. Dukakis’s helmeted bobble-head on a joy ride in an M-1 tank. 

The pictures were the attack, and the attacks (backed by dollars on TV as well as earned media) stuck. (That Dukakis never credibly responded until it was too late did not help matters.) The mantra afterward was that each charge needed to be responded to forcefully, clearly, for that response to be effective.

Have we reached that 1988 tipping point in the 2008 campaign?  Is Obama responding to this particular ad? Not so far.

True, we are in a different era, where voters’ news diets of Big Three TV and newspapers of record have been supplanted by a simmering stew of information resources in which the current presidential campaigns are also marinating. Network TV is in that pot, so is cable, and print, but they are joined more than ever by new media such as blogs and web ads and community web sites and YouTube.  Each are digitized and can pick up on one another’s copy and content or be adapted to their media rivals’ needs with relative ease - sometimes in hours or even minutes, a time frame that would have provoked gasps 20 or even eight years ago.

This is a confusing and imprecise landscape from which to draw a firm conclusion on how to respond. So Obama may be right to let his headshot hang alongside the windbreakered, bewhiskered Iranian’s. Iran has not been invaded nor has Iran provoked any other U.S. action to catapult McCain’s insinuated charge into heightened relevance. 

If Iran acts up and this modest little web ad suddenly has more salience,  it won’t be the first time Obama let the McCain campaign drive the debate online into the broader news media. Anyone notice the debate on a moratorium on gas taxes?  That was started by McCain, has been a staple of McCain’s web campaign since spring, and now it’s everywhere.  Arguably it backfired, at least so far. Pundits scoffed.  Obama leads by most polls. 

But seeing Obama’s headshot with Ahamadinejad above a reasonable-sounding question with the phrase “anti-American foreign” in bold letters, for the third consecutive month, isn’t it also reasonable to ask:

Is the Obama campaign making a mistake this time?