They failed in their quest to attack one of Barack Obama’s strong suit — his image — and so they’re trying something else: Team McCain is now attacking Obama’s signature issue, his strongest, er, strong suit, which is the economy. It’s the single main issue on which Americans trust Obama more than McCain.
And so Team McCain has once again switched to Bush Mode: identify your opponent’s main strength, attack it, weaken it, then take it and slam him with it.
I don’t believe the guys over at Fivethirtyeight.com, the people who say that they “do polls right”. I also don’t believe the aggregate of the polls at Realclearpolitics.com. Or Pollster.com. I don’t think neither of those companies or websites is correct, due to the Big Black Holes in this particular election.
Two things: Barack Obama is a fast learner, and he’s a man of his word. First, he has learned from people who last week gave him the right advice, and second, he’s sticking by his promise that he would not allow the GOP to do to him what they did to Al Gore and John Kerry.
Obama and his campaign have been dominating the campaign, relentlessly bombarding McCain with everything they’ve got for more than 48 hours. That’s two full news cycles. And Team McCain seems to be getting worried, as they are back to responding to Obama. Two days ago, McCain was confidently saying that “the fundamentals of the US economy are strong”. Today, McCain is acknowledging that, yes, perhaps the economy is indeed in bad shape…
Let’s see if Team Obama can keep it up.
QUICK ADD TO QUICK: But there is a danger. If McCain can somehow manage to neutralize the economy-issue, by turning around and acknowledging the problems and make people believe that he, too, promises real change, then it’s back to square one for Obama.
It’s not often that a big player in the mainstream media turns around and publicly chastises a candidate for the presidency. But that’s just what Associated Press did in this analysis. Mark Halperin of ‘The Page’ titled his take on the analysis as ‘AP Slams McCain-Palin’. I guess that’s about right.
The AP writer thrashes McCain’s mudslinging of the past days. The problem: McCain was a target of mudslinging in 2000, when his then-rival George W. Bush started an outrageous slander campaign against him. So McCain took the moral high ground and said that he’d never engage in such a campaign himself.
Every four years in America, somebody takes out a cattle prod and slams it up the bum of approximately half the population. Those are the ones who go out to vote during presidential elections. Suddenly, they wake up, pull their heads from the sand, and in their naivete expect the political campaigns to inform them about the candidates and their positions.
Like I said, every four years. But this year’s voter vintage seems exceptionally stupid.
A new Wall Street Journal / NBC poll (opens as Acrobat .pdf document) out today shows that a majority of voters questioned is comfortable with the idea of having Sarah Palin in the White House as vice-president, despite a “national debate” on whether she’s experienced enough for the job.
That’s very interesting. Because polls have for months been showing that voters are somewhat concerned over Barack Obama’s lack of experience. It is the very reason why Team McCain has from the start been highlighting Obama’s perceived “lack of experience”. Obama selected Joe Biden, a Senator with 33 years of experience in foreign affairs, to be his running mate. That’s a lot of experience, but it hardly made a difference in the polls.
So what can we conclude from this? That experience is something that only troubles Obama? Or is experience simply not that important to voters?
‘John McCain. Change we can fear.’
(Seen on an ABC News message board.)
Hilarious.
“He’s been hurt by nagging questions about his leadership experience as the GOP tries to shift the election from a referendum on Republican economic policies to a test of whether Obama is up to the job of president”, wrote the excellent Glenn Thrush of Politico.com about Barack Obama.
That’s exactly what happened to Kerry in 2004. Team Rove managed to make the election a referendum on Kerry’s character, not about Bush’s wreaking of havoc. If Team Obama allows the same to happen this time, they will lose the election in a grandiose way. And they will have deserved it.
UPDATE: Arianna Huffington also hits the nail on the head. Let’s see if Team Obama will listen. But I’m starting to wonder whether there’s a new problem on the horizon… For political journalists, the “McCain is just like Bush” line is getting a little stale. Being journalists, they’re in want of ‘new’ lines. Obama will thus have to repackage his ‘McCain is Bush’ line in several new ways, or they’ll simply start to ignore it.
John McCain got an election ‘bounce’ in the polls. As expected. The reasons why are different: the Republican base is re-energized now that veep-candidate Sarah Palin has taken away many doubts about McCain among right-wing, social extremists who formed the electoral base of George W. Bush. They’re once again rallying to the flag. Others, who were on the fence in previous polls and were leaning McCain, have now jumped off that fence — straight into McCain’s camp.
And now comes the ultimate test, as described in my previous post (and hours before these new Gallup polls came out): who of the two candidates brings change, but not too much change?
My money’s on McCain, for all the wrong reasons. Obama will have to shift into 4th gear and the debates still remain; but there’s not a whole lot in terms of issues Obama can pull from the shelf, and McCain is the better debater.
As I wrote here, McCain gaining on Obama in the polls would give Obama another reason to get worried. “Because then The Media’s big story will be ‘John McCain, The Comeback Grandpa’. And that would constitute Reason 5.” I had previously named 4 reasons why Obama would be losing; number 5 is just around the corner.
John McCain likes to portray himself as somewhat of a maverick. A Republican who thinks out of the box. Most of the media have painted his pick of Sarah Palin as his vice-president as an example of that, er, ‘maverickness’. But it’s not. On the contrary, this election is slowly but surely (and once again) turning out about that age-old question: “Who would you trust most?” Add to that: “Who, of us two, poses least risk?”
