Obama supporters are celebrating the new polls which show him taking a lead nationally and in quite a few battleground states. But this a crucial time and they must make sure that complacency and resulting inaction doesn’t creep in.
John Kerry was leading in some polls (though not by this wide a margin) too around this time in 2004 and they decided that they would play it safe and fight a ‘positive’ campaign, avoid attacking (or even defend attacks strongly) and just ignore the republican attacks completely. Obviously, that didn’t help and the sad part is that those attacks actually had given him a golden opportunity to seal the deal but his campaign were just blind to that opportunity.
Some republicans are still a bit cocky, remembering 2004, and they strongly believe that they can still turn this election around and decimate Obama with their vaunted attack machine. So, make no mistake about it, the republicans are arming the battle stations right now and will come out with a blistering ‘shock and awe’ attack operation soon. They might make some small incursions while the debates are still going on, as those will be the focus of the headlines till they last. The "Obama is pals with terrorists" attack is just the beginning of a blistering "nuclear" attack wave.
The economic crisis threw a huge spanner in the works for Rove and the McCain campaign for it made them lose momentum on the attacks and distracted the voters’ attention. Starting with the convention they have been doing what they do best, which is to pummel the opponent by whatever means possible including outright lies, deception and manipulation of information and paint the other person as the most extreme wacko left wing liberal this side of the milky way, who is trying to get elected so that he can down wine and cheese (and arugula) with hollywood stars.
I think the republicans are right to pursue that strategy and just replay the tapes of 2004 because it is implausibly obvious that the democrats still don’t have an answer to their attacks and all they still (!) manage in response is to either say “Oh, we wont pay attention to those mean republicans as their attacks are beneath our response” or the more battle-ready vocal wing will come up with “let us attack back and let us again (and again and again) remind voters that McCain is out of touch, and that his term will be four more years of the Bush and let’s show some photos of him and Bush together”. Let me give it to you campaign folks straight if you are still dense enough not to get it – “these ads just don’t cut it anymore”.
I looked at the recent ad “attacking” McCain on the economy and they are a mind-numbing repetition of the same “McCain is out of touch” attack that I talked about above and also discussed in detail when a similar rehash of it came out in early September. Any message loses its value when repeated over and over. You got to take a new tack on the attacks. I would receommend trying a new approach and as I detailed in this article earlier, I would try to brand McCain (and Palin) as a ‘flip-flopper’ who just cannot decide if our economy is in trouble or not and when the truth is finally hammered into him he cannot decide what to do get the economy out of trouble. The ad should end with “Clueless and Indecisive on America’s biggest financial crisis. We cannot take a risk with John McCain.” Or something of that sort. The idea is to paint the image of McCain, on a more deeper character level that just saying he’s “out of touch”, as a person who is unfit to be president both on a character level and also on an experience level.
I’ve detailed the overall master strategy in this article, which advocates pre-emptive strikes and strong counter-attacks when they start their bombardment, but obviously our attacks have to be relevant and fresh and have to connect to the voters. I’ve also advocated a few more high-level tactics in my master strategy, especially to appeal to battleground voters, like “hitting them from further from the right than they are” (you gotta scream louder about patriotism and American exceptionalism) on certain topics like destroying Laden and his band of terrorists and on outsourcing of jobs. Another crucial aspect is that you've got to hit back hard on the topic of attack. Do not just counter it by saying "they are saying that to distract voters from the economy" like you did with the recent "Obama is pals with terrorists" attack. Hit back hard on how they are manipulating the information, how deceptive they are, and defend yourself so strongly that you turn the tables. DO NOT try to avoid or change the topic of attack.