The “Stop Obama” bus — call it the Trash Talk Express — rolled through Colorado on Sunday, on its two-week tour through battleground states “to defeat Barack Obama in the 2008 presidential election.” Tour sponsor the Our Country Deserves Better PAC promises it “won’t be subtle or vague” and pulled no punches at its rallies in Pueblo, Colorado Springs and Denver.
“We’re trying to get the word out about Barack Obama and his liberal policies that will turn our country farther to the left,” Our Country Deserves Better spokesman Kelly Eustis told the Colorado Independent as the bus made its way north on I-25 Sunday afternoon. “Especially in a lot of the swing states, people feel left behind because the McCain campaign has pulled out.” The bus has a heavy schedule throughout Michigan, which McCain abandoned earlier this month, as well as days spent in Ohio and Pennsylvania before arriving in Washington.
To coincide with its bus tour, the PAC started airing an attack ad in Colorado this weekend that is “essentially a compilation of most of the character and association attacks made against Barack Obama throughout the year,” according to CBS News.
Sponsored by the same pro-war activists who hatched Move America Forward, the 40-city tour aims to rally conservatives by going into territory where even the McCain-Palin campaign declines to tread. That includes a television ad featuring Che Guevara, Hamas and the Rev. Jeremiah Wright urging God to “damn America.”
Here’s the “Obama’s Wrong Values” ad airing in Colorado:
The 30-second ad begins with a narrator intoning, “Barack Obama seems to have different values from most Americans,” while a spotlight lands on Obama without his hand on his heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. “His supporters put up Cuban flags with the murderous leftist Che Guevara in Obama’s campaign offices. Obama’s campaign received $33,000 in illegal donations from Palestinians living in the Middle East. A top official of the terrorist group Hamas endorsed Obama’s campaign. And who can forget these hateful sermons from Obama’s pastor of over 20 years,” as footage of Wright’s infamous words plays.
The tour hasn’t been without its mishaps and disappointments. Crowds — using the term loosely — have been “small but dedicated,” according to a tour blog kept by conservative commentator Mark Williams. “They are hungry for any indication of life from the GOP and we are being greeted as political saviours,” Williams wrote from Ely, Nev., on Friday. The day before, the bus encountered a “small but fired up group of folks” in Carson City before running into a “Stop McCain” bus piloted by a group of nurses on their own tour of swing states. And overnight in Flagstaff, Ariz., vandals taped paper walrus mustaches on McCain and Palin’s photos on the side of the bus. “It reminds us that we are going to be encountering some serious thuggery down the road,” Williams wrote, comparing the bus tour to “Jimmy Dolittle in the Raid over Tokyo.”
“Stop Obama” organizers are urging supporters to bring resumes to the rallies, “if you have any executive experience — either as someone who ran or started your own small business, or a housemom who raised a family, or a senior-level executive who had high-level responsibilities.” The PAC intends to display a giant stack of resumes from average Americans with “more executive experience than Barack Obama, who now wants to be president & Commander in Chief of the United States!” Three lucky resumes will be plucked from the pile and their authors flown to Washington for interviews, organizers say.
It’s not all anti-Obama invective and red meat. Tour stops include a musical interlude with Lloyd Marcus, singing his version of “Sarah Smile” with lyrics Hall and Oates never imagined:
Her qualifications are plain to see
and when it comes to character
she really moves me
So let’s go — and pull the lever
Sarah smile …She stands for freedom and liberty
and when it comes to our country
she feels like you and me
We’ve gotta go — and pull the lever
Sarah smile
Here’s what it sounded like in Albuquerque on Saturday:
The bus has stops for rallies in Colby, Kan., and Kansas City on Monday.
