Andrew Sullivan writes that, "Since Obama's hubris in Berlin, he has lost almost every cycle of this campaign, and lost all of them quite badly. I'm not sure his campaign gets how far they have sunk, and how ineffectual and passive Obama has seemed these past few weeks."
Setting aside the Berlin thing -- why, again, is giving a good speech evidence of hubris? -- I'm wondering what Andrew thinks Obama is actually losing. Is he losing support? Polling, while not perfectly reliable by any stretch of the imagination, is really the only gauge we to get some advance sense of how the presidential campaign will end, and the polling has remained steadily in Obama's favor thus far, only today dropping into a tie. The polling geniuses at FiveThirtyEight point to a three recent state polls that show Obama losing some ground. These results can likely be attributed to the fact that Obama has been out of the public eye for a week in which McCain has been center-stage with his Cold War rhetoric.
So what Andrew means, of course, is that Obama is losing "media cycles," the prime measurement of such meta-commentators as Mark Halperin. It's an almost nonsensical way to try and measure the presidential race -- gather up all your anecdotal takes on which way the press is leaning this week, divide by how many sound bites each campaign gets, multiply by your personal biases and that equals, what, exactly? Folks in the media often think they are the prime audience for the campaigns because campaigns rely on them to get their messages out, but the real audience is voters, who interpret things much differently.
The McCain camp reinforces the media's belief that they are most important by providing all of their ads to the press. But the Obama campaign has a different strategy -- rather than focusing all of their energy on earned media, they try and bring their ads directly to local audiences (see this note about his "Stealth Campaign"), and put together strong field programs. They're also counting on a successful convention and strong debates, and remembering the fact that most voters aren't yet paying attention to the campaigns.
So when Andrew wonders how far the Obama campaign has sunk, I wonder if he's referring to the three or four points he lost in the polls this week -- after a good month of negative sleaze from the McCain camp -- or if he is just disappointed that Obama is giving Hillary Clinton a prominent place at the convention. This election is far from over, and if current trends continue, it's possible that Obama could lose. Nothing is a given in politics. But I recall similar anxiety among pundits during the primary. I doubt anyone in the Obama camp is happy about the current standings, but they do have a sound strategy, and they are sticking to it.
--Tim Fernholz
