McCain's strategy is to run out the clock over the next 50 something days. He hopes no one notices he's not saying anything.

So yes, he will try to manufacture a series of short controversies to control the narrative.

However, he doesn't understand something about narratives as well. He's peaking too soon. The media likes to have a tight race. If they think he's become old news, they will move on to some narrative that Obama is pushing.

This rings true, and the realization that this is probably what Obama's campaign is thinking is very depressing.

The other side of the story seems to be, particularly from Obama's supporters, that driving a different set of attacks against McCain would ruin Obama's "new kind of politics" brand. I worry, sometimes, that Obama actually believes in that.

The truth is that Obama can engage in destructive attacks of character assassination against McCain precisely because he's already branded himself as the candidate of "a new kind of politics." Everyone "knows" this about him already, so scurrilous attacks against McCain wouldn't hurt Obama. The problem, of course, is that Obama's campaign is full of true believers.

It is an incredibly weird way to approach an institution that is, at base, stupid, simple, hungry for constantly-changing narratives, and utterly and proudly amoral. It's not going to happen. The dynamic of this election is that the media covers conflict and the McCain campaign gets up each morning and gives them a new conflict to cover. The Obama campaign does not, and thus the McCain campaign sets the agenda.

That's what Hillary's campaign thought.

The optics of that stink for them.

The use of "optics" to mean "appearances", or whatever the people who use it mean by it, is bad enough, but this....Yikes. The optics stink? How could anyone write that sentence?

Good post, EK.

You've diagnosed the problem (as have many others), but what's the cure. What can Obama do to create conflict and drive the narrative?

Except the Obama campaign does assert new attacks, kind of all the time, and I'm sure you know this because you get all the emails. There's a missing component to this, and that's the particular attacks that the media chooses to cover or ignore.

I guess everyone has an opinion about what Obama should do, so here's mine. I think that every day, he should taunt McCain about how he's afraid to talk about the issues, how he's afraid to give a real interview, how he won't tell the American people what he plans to change or how he plans to change it. The McCain campaign intends to avoid talking policy as much as possible. You can't make the McCain campaign talk policy, and you can't make the media focus on policy, but if Obama started goading McCain, McCain would either be forced into giving some kind of response or he wouldn't respond and that would become the focus.

I don't know if it would work, but I do know the media loves a good spat, and I think they would focus on it if Obama did this. (And I'm not suggesting that he do it in a nasty way, just in his usual, affable way.)

16 years from now:

Atheist lesbian presidential candidate, Americasux Taxhike will be ahead by 20 points. Fox News will spend a day criticizing her shoes. The blogosphere will go into a panic and generate a million different theories on how she needs to get her campaign on track immediately.

Obama is going to win this election. I know a lot of you are genetically prone to panic or something, but a presidential candidate is always in the strongest position he will ever be in a week after his convention. That the strongest position McCain will ever be able to hold puts him about 1-2% ahead of Obama is reason to feel confident. It is not reason to be worried. This is the best they will ever do. Our best position is 6+% above their guy. Theirs is a statistical tie with us.

I know a week feels like an eternity in a campaign, everyone needs to get a grip or stop paying attention because you just don't have the stomach for the natural ups and downs of a campaign.

I blame the blogs here. Many bloggers, especially those at Open Left and Talking Points Memo, know better. They just let their own fear get the better of them. They are living eternally in 1988. They should be leaders, explaining the realities of a campaign to you all. Instead, they are following the reactions of their readers.

I agree with Soullite. There is no attempt to contextualize the numbers at all.

Actually, I'm living eternally in 2000, and I will be till we get a Democrat in the White House again.

I agree that some forceful attacks would be nice to hear from Obama. There are lots of good ideas out there:

1) McCain wants to take away your health insurance
2) McCain wants to charge rape victims for rape kits
3) McCain doesn't want children educated about child molestation
4) McCain is in cahoots with an Italian con man and his movie star girlfriend

Any one of these would be devastating on its own. But pushing them one after the other, on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday of next week would probably kill the McCain campaign once and for all.

I want to point out an example of what Soullite refers to in the form of Chris Bowers at Talk Left. I don't think he realizes it but everything he writes and how he chooses to frame it is based on a pessimism about where he thinks Obama should be versus whether where Obama is - is a bad thing or not. For example, he will take where the Democratic Congessional races were in 2006, and from there argue Obama is underperforming compared to the Congressional races. Indeed, his language continuously contains small quips such as today along the lines of . He doesn't contextualize the numbers in terms of 2004 at all. He claims that 2004 is not relevant, but Congressional numbers are.

It's a pessimism in search of a way to support itself. He claims he is just reporting the numbers , but to me he seems to be massaging them. Reporting the numbers would require contextualizing that we are about one week from the end of the GOP convention, and the GOP bounce didn't even last the full week. The state polling data expected shows a tightening of the race, and only with averaging, ignoring some polls, but not others and then taking the most pessismistic view about "why Obama isn't winning if the elections were held today" does one reach this level of planning Obama's funeral. For example, he sites a Nevada poll without analyzing it's internals to determine is it indeed a poll that is a reflection of what's happening in the state.

Let me be clear- I am not expecting them to sugarcoat their analyis. I believe the race to be close/tied right now. What I have a problem with is the lack of contextualization of what the numbers mean and the hyper intense way at which the internet moves versus the real world.

I am sure if a set of numbers comes out tommorrow showing Obama is up they will say that the race has fundamentally changed, and blah, blah, blah. They will be as wrong then too. Rather than general impressions, they are acting as if the numbers are set in stone as to electoral college outcomes.

Insofar as McCain's BS attacks of the past few days keep the focus away from the issues, they might help him 'win' a couple of news cycles. But are any of them going to stick? Maybe I'm I starry-eyes optimist, but I can't see a whole lot of swing voters buying into either "Obama is a crude misogynist" or "Obama is a child molester" lines, whereas the attack "Obama is an inexperienced, elitist celebrity" had some chance of gaining traction and doing real damage.

On the other hand, the past few days do pose a danger to McCain: I can imagine a "McCain/Palin are sleazy and dishonest" meme starting to catch on. The liberal blogosphere is (rightly) unhappy with the MSM, but there has been some pushback from them on the McCain campaign's serial dishonesty.

incidentally- here is the poll that Bowers is using to base his pessmism about Nevada upon:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/RCP_PDF/IA_Nevada%20General%20Election%20Poll%209%2011%2008.pdf

If he were the only one, I would be less bothered, but this seems to be a pattern of viewing the numbers as set in stone when if you compared 2004 to 2008, the reality is that this period was volatile and turned out to be numerically wrong when compared to the polling a month later.

For example-- Gallup 2 weeks after the Kerry/Bush with the GOP convention had Bush up by 15. By Oct 15 he they were at parity. A week later, Gallup has McCain up by 4, and on the decline less than a week later.

Pegging one against the other rather than basing one's thought on gut and fear, I am hard pressed to see why pessimism really reflects 'just the numbers' as Bowers claims rather than actually his and others need to run at internet, rather than real world speed.

Frankly, I think Obama's lipstick on a pig was brilliant. First he made it perfectly clear that he was talking about policy not Mrs. Palin. Surely he knew that McCain had used the line in exactly the same context against Hillary's health plan and surely he knew the repugs would bite. They did, they bought right into it and got nicely slapped for it.

I think he should use the line often to describe what McCain calls change.

Watch out Ezra. Pay attention to Saturday morning in NH.

Take a page out of the Rethugs playbook. Hit them hard on their record, tie McSame to it and DON'T LET UP!
Attack, accuse, nail them on their record and their statements. Make them defend what can't be defended. Of course BO wants to avoid the "angry black man" but be angry about what has happened to your country and let the surrogates be nasty.
Have HRC and JB gone MIA?

It's struck me that the wonderful little riffs Obama does on these controversies are sort of how you'd respond if the world were run by Daily Show viewers

At what point will it occur to you that Obama has no idea how to talk to anyone except arch, overeducated elite liberals? That group and blacks (who voted for him regardless of what he said) were enough to win him the nomination, thanks to skewed delegate allocations and caucuses.

This is exactly what Clintonites--the ones who didn't want to vote for McCain--were trying to warn you about. He's an inept candidate with an excellent campaign management and two baked in constituencies. Nothing else. He will not be able to reach out to anyone, because he's cold, arrogant, and narcissistic.

Me, I want McCain to win, because I wouldn't trust that empty suit and a Congress run by Pelosi to start a car, much less run the country. So despite always voting Dem, I'm just happy that my predictions are playing out (so far, fingers crossed).

But those who want their messiah to pull it off had best hope that enough people vote against Republicans, because he's never going to get the vote based on people voting for him.

Make McCain answer for criticizing the initiative to teach children how to avoid child molesters. This can be expressed in several different ways, by Obama and surrogates, again and again, all without lying or practicing gutter politics. It's a legitimate criticism.
I also haven't heard enough counter-attacking on McCain's view of Social Security, or of his hasty, thoughtless process in selecting a VP.

Now that Obama has called in the calvary in the form of 527s we need to see some wonderful savaging of McCain and, yes, Palin.

Obama's best hope to define Palin as a political extremist whose not ready for prime time and a McCain as an ambitious wimp who has sold out every single of his stated principles in order to get in bed with GOP elite in order to be president.
And Obama will need 527s to carry it out.

You're an idiot, Cal. Get prepared to cross your fingers all over again when President McCain starts a war with Iran & Russia.

What is 'overeducated' exactly and when do you attain it?

I mean I am thinking about the implications of that concept right now and it is just blowing my mind.

Obama doesn't need to develop a new campaign strategy. He's got the votes. He needs to develop a legal strategy to deal with GOP tomfoolery at the ballot box. That's the only area where I don't feel confident about this election.