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My working hypothesis of the Barack Obama campaign's strategy over the past few months has gone something like this:
Things that happen before September don't really matter. Our kick-off in the general election is the convention, just as our kick-off in Iowa was the Jefferson-Jackson dinner. We have a lot more money than John McCain. We are ahead in the polls. Attacking now won't seriously damage McCain and may open us to charges that were running a brutally negative campaign or trying to buy the election. As the new kid on the block, we can't fire first. Meanwhile, if McCain attacks us now, he'll be defined as running a negative, crassly political, campaign, which will quietly undermine the perception that he's above politics and render him vulnerable to a later assault. And if his attacks land and the polls tighten -- and they'll inevitably tighten -- we will have the money and the time to launch an overwhelming counterattack in the final months, when events will move too quickly for anyone to care about our spending or direct sustained attention to the attacks we have blanketing the airwaves.I'm not sure if all of those premises are true. The McCain campaign has been running their own strategy over the same period, and through trial-and-error, they've found a fairly powerful frame in this "celebrity" meme, one which may prove effective in dampening the imagery that comes out of the Democratic convention. Obama's poll numbers are down, and his unfavorable numbers are up. But there are suggestions that Obama's strategy is working, too. A new NBC/WSJ poll finds "Nearly three in 10 voters, 29%, pointed to McCain as the candidate running a negative campaign, compared to just 5% who said Obama is running a negative campaign. McCain's 29% rating is the highest of any one candidate in the previous two presidential elections." Similarly, a CBS/NYT poll says, "A majority of voters say McCain is spending more time attacking Obama than explaining what he would do as president. Obama, by better than two to one, is viewed as running a positive campaign." And you can expect the Democratic convention to be overwhelmingly positive. At the same time, the Obama campaign is beginning to blanket individual states with hard negative ads on McCain -- but even as the press is reporting the existence of the ads, they're not giving them much attention, and are mainly describing them in terms of "the Obama campaign has begun answering calls to respond to months of McCain attack ads..." My hunch is that a lot of folks in Chicago are looking at those polls and saying everything is going according to the plan. Whether the plan will work or not is another story entirely.
