"If McCain is always there for our troops, does his voting record prove it?"

Did you see Olbermann's tour de force on this tonight on Countdown? It was superb.

I really relate to how you're feeling, teemunny. I don't share the common consensus that he has a brilliant campaign team in terms of communications and message and they all proved us wrong by winning the primary. (By us I mean those of us who were worried about his campaign after Texus.) I think everyone who thinks his campaign is brilliant and knows what it's doing forgets that the only reason he won the nomination was Clintons' team's incredible mismanagement: taking for granted it would all be over on Super Tuesday and not working the caucus states thus ceding a mathematical advantage she could never overcome.

I think it's a huge flaw for Obama that he himself cannot reconcile a conflict he perceives between his theme of change and new politics on the one hand and negative campaigning. I think he's hugely handicapped by this perception of his. I agree with you that it's a false choice. I suspect his staff believe it is too.

I don't believe you can win a major campaign such as this, especially when it's as close as it is, without attack politics. They work. The republicans are going to do such a hit job on Obama it'll make the Kerry campaign look like a relative honeymoon. If Obama isn't prepared to do a hit job on McCain - both on his character/conduct of the campaign and his policies - then I think he'll go down the gurgler. Because we've seen it so clearly now: with the exception of MSNBC, the media is spouting all the McCain camp's junk, it's being far more critical of Obama, it's not going to do the job for Obama. He and his surrogates are going to have to do it themselves.

Here's hoping I'm wrong.

(My one ray of hope is that McCain is so clearly poor on facts and can be so irascible when he doesn't like his opponent and gets challenged that Obama absolutely creams him in the debates. But no doubt McCain's advisers know this just as well as everyone else and prepares him against it.)

Meh.

I think they're doing pretty good. Keep in mind that we're still 100 days out. Also keep in mind that most Americans really couldn't give a crap precisely why Obama was forced to cancel a visit to a hospital in Germany. And the people who really care about that story do so, mainly, because they're *already* passionately partisan Republicans or Democrats.

Swing voters aren't interested. Mainly, they want to know that Obama is going to save their job and make gas cheaper. So I think the economic summit today will turn out to have been a better use of time than counter-punching.

But Obama is capable of loading for boar when it's called for. In SC, he (briefly) ran some very negative ads against HRC.

But that's not the game plan. Right now, he's introducing himself to the electorate, and establishing credentials.

I completely agree with you. McCain has made some pretty serious 180's over the past two weeks (more troops in Afghanistan, negotiations with Iran, Iraq timetable, etc), and if Obama's campaign can't capitalized on that, I don't know what he can capitalize on.

I think Obama's press team is complacent. They don't know how to manage the press well and they're letting McCain dominate the news cycles.

That's not how you run a campaign. Instead of viewing this from the perspective of -- "Obama's still ahead of McCain" -- we should be asking -- "Why the hell isn't Obama further ahead?"

I see your point. I get these Kerry flashbacks when he was getting slammed with the Swiftboat stuff and was doing nothing, or at least nothing intelligently aggressive. And this Gallup poll with McCain ahead with consideration to the historical aspects of that poll 100 days out predicting the winner of the campaign makes me get quivers thinking that the worst-and it would be the worst-might happen. Yet, I see that Obama's team is sharp, mindful of the same worries all of us have, and hard-hitting when they need to be.

They have a plan which McCain's campaign which is infighting and frustrated apparently don't as their ads are demonstrating. I think that Obama sort of has things on automatic and is letting McCain beat himself. The fact that McCain is on the ugly attack so soon which I'm sure will accelerate as things heat up shows that he's an empty shirt: A verb, a noun, POW, offshore drilling and Iraq...blah, blah, blah.

The Clintons really did help improve his abilities as a candidate, his toughness and his campaigns readiness to fight. I think there's a lot to hit McCain on and they are just holding fire until they really need to. There is enough time and they're patient enough to let the truth and facts do the battle for them. For instance this whole dust-up about McCain's lie about Obama hating the troops and canceling his military base visit in Germany because he wasn't able to bring cameras. It was such a big fib, that even though the media needed a little push they're coming out with stories now (NBC, NYT, Wash Post) saying that McCain was doing more than exagerating.

The RNC's stupid Facebook parody is sinking and being thrown back in their faces; Ted Stephens was indicted; McCain had a chunk of his face removed...the political gods are raining gifts upon Democrats and dung on the Republicans. Still, they enjoy dung and Democrats have a noted talent for letting opportunity slip away.

is it in Obama to defend himself? methinks he may be doing the cantabrigian wuss thang too well.

here is a mccain flipflop on taxes, and the Obama people are deaf. or without a pulse. mccain would have taken advantage. perhaps it's true that Obama doesn't have experience, or he would be all over mccain about it. regardless of the 'gentleman' stance he portrays. it's not going to get him into the white house looking like he's not going to defend himself or our country.

Oh, for Christ's sake people. Enough with the Democrat Chicken Dance, already. He's doing fine. The USA Today "likely voter" model, which Gallup concedes is different than the one is used in May, inexplicably assumes that equal numbers of Democrats and Republicans are "likely voters," which is absolute nonsense.

Moreover, unlike us, the other 93% of the country does not live immersed in the blogosphere and the Internet news world where a minute is a day and an hour is an eternity. Three days is plenty quick for a response ad and, if his experience with Hillary is any guide, its pretty much the sweetspot most of the time when it comes to dealing with the low info voters who are most likely to respond to an attack ad--long enough to separate the slurs that have legs from the ones that don't without letting them fester. (And in any case its an incredibly short amount of time in which to create and ad, test it and then get it on the air in the same market as the one its responding to.).

Damn, its like no one remembers last summer. Obama was down 25 points and his supporters and the MSM alike people were running around doing the full Chicken Little over it. "Ooooohhh, ooohhh, he can't get any traction in the polls, oooohh Hillary'w running away with it, ooooh, oohhh, he needs to hit back harder and faster, he needs to run a massive ad campaign, he needs to do this or that and right now! He can't hit back, Ohmigod, ohmigod, ohmigod!"

And Obama held a conference call with his big donors and calmed them the hell down and went back and continued working his plan.

So what's the difference between this summer and last summer? Obama has more money than he did then, his opponent is older, uglier, dumber, more unpopular with his base, has no organizational or political skill, and the only people who like him are a few doughnuts on the bus buddies who think eh's still the same guy he was before Mephistopholes came calling long about 2002.

So come on, dontcha think that, just maybe, after pulling off the unthinkable and overcoming the Inevitable Hillary Clinton and her Perfect Campaign, that, at the very least, Obama and his team have earned a little bit of faith from us that he might actually know what the hell he's doing?

Yes?

Then could y'all please just cowboy up and ride? Because we do have a lot of work to do, and all the flapping and vaporing is not going to get the doggies down the trail, okay?

(I am, of course, excluding the Comrades from the Clintonite wing of the party from this exhortation. If a little dooming and glooming and the occaisional sneer is the cost of your support, y'all have earned it and its a small price to pay.)

Obama needs to call McCain out more directly on his mis-statements and his fluid positions. If Obama's chief focus is "looking" or "acting" presidential so that the electorate will become more comfortable with him in the role he will lose. He will lose because he would not have made the case that not only is he the better option when compared to McCain but he is also the safer option.

For McCain to only be trailing by as few points as he is is symptomatic of the under performance of Barack when it comes to really fighting for the position. He needs to get a little dirt under his finger nails. In a close fight McCain probably has the edge in part because of the Bradley affect and right now it looks like a close fight.

What Barack needs to do is to make some honest hits on McCains record to date:

Taxes
Support of Bushes policies
Women right to choose
Healthcare
Vets affairs

the list goes on and on just pick a handful and his words and positions will speak for themselves without any editing.

The cautionary tail is 2004 when the reality was clear of what George W represented and still we had the headline in England ""HOW CAN 59,054,087 PEOPLE BE SO DUMB?" after Bush was elected. I suspect that people are no smarter now and if Barack wants to win it will be his job to educate them on the likely realities of what McCain represents