Monday, October 06, 2008

goldfish memories

For the second time this campaign, I'm starting to hear/read an awful lot of people getting complacent that Obama will hammer McCain on election day. This comes right as McCain unveils a massively negative campaign like the one that severely lowered Obama's number a couple of months ago, and the one that lauched Hillary's comeback a couple of months before that.

Supposedly this time we're going to see something different: a strong negative retort from Team Obama along Keating 5 lines. Hopefully this at least shows that Obama and the Democrats have learned an important lesson from '04 and from earlier this year: if the opposition successfully makes the election about you, you lose. The message from here on out should be: John McCain is the wrong guy to fix the economy.

In any case, despite how everything appears at the moment, I for one fully expect this race to tighten as McCain's incessant hammering dampens support for Obama.

1 comment:

Mr. Dickerson said...

Agreed. Celebration/complacency is very premature. If the polls can be this volatile this late, then, as the cliche goes, anything can happen. Nonetheless, I comfort myself with the following two facts:

1) McCain needs a game-changer to truly turn the electoral math on its head. This is certainly possible, but the pressure is on him to make a whole new pitch to the American people.

2) McCain has been bad at "game-changers" so far. 3 or 4 slogans. Flip flops. Hail Marys. Wildly out of touch comments.

The underreported phenomenon in the latest poll numbers is the degree to which Obama's debate performance has recalibrated the public's perception of him. Far too much coverage has been devoted to McCain's implosion during crisis, the anti-Republican economic "atmospherics" and, of course, the comedy fodder that is Sarah Palin. A little credit should go O's way for being a cool customer, for sounding calm and trustworthy, and for talking to Americans (yet again) like we're grown-ups who can ultimately look past what Sarah Silverman calls his "super fucking shitty name."