John
McCain is experiencing a healthy bump in the polls.  Or perhaps Obama
is experiencing a healthy drop in the polls.  What happened, and what's
happening?

Couple things going on:

McCain Front:

    McCain shakes up his campaign to add Steve Schmidt as an advisor.  Note the change in campaign form toward the Rovian bent. 

   
McCain is limiting access to himself.  Schmidt knows McCain will commit
gaffe after gaffe speaking extemporaneously to reporters.  Limit press
coverage of McCain, limit the gaffes. 

    McCain needs to burn
through his primary cash to recieve public funds before the convention.
Outspending Obama in several states.

    Saddleback.  McCain shows his experience being on TV. 

Obama Front:

   
Obama has been building up his ground operations in order to compete
with the built in ground operations Republicans usually exploit
(churches, veterans organizations, rotary clubs, lodges, etc)

   
Obama was criticized for not having enough foreign policy credentials. 
Take a trip around the world, alongside rapturous crowds and smiling
foreign heads of state.  Check. 

    Obama's campaigning has
been flat.  Up until the Saddleback forum, Barack Obama's been fairly
innocuous in terms of negatively portraying John McCain.  He's is
revving that up right now. 

    Obama is working hard right now
to raise funds.  He will get a funding boost after the conventions,
when his maxxed out donors will once again be able to donate to him. 

What to expect after the Conventions:

   
Ok, so Obama seems to have been ignoring something recently.  His
message.  That is not wholely unexpected.  How many people are paying
attention during the summer?  His team was smart enough to exploit the
caucus system in the primaries.  They know when elections are won:
after the conventions. 

    McCain and Obama have to play
fundamentally different games.  McCain needs to burn through cash now,
and use his money wisely after the convention.  Obama is going for the
post convention blitz.  Obama is amassing his war chest, having spent
significant sums in laying the ground work with his network of
volunteers in all 50 states.  We see him beginning to microtarget swing
districts, with out much fanfare.  I bet that there are at least 5-10
different advertisements running on local networks, highlighting the
concerns of that media market.  He has stayed away from publicly
criticizing McCain (until recently) specifically.  Out come the
conventions.  Post conventions, Obama will be able to tap into his 2
million person donor network, and he won't be raising this money over
the course of months.  He's going to have a VERY good September.  I'm
predicting his September fundraising numbers to be in the 60 or 70
million range, virtually erasing most of the 84 million dollar gap. 
October will be similar in his numbers, giving him a large
financial advantage over McCain and the GOP.  Nationwide spots
featuring prominently his change message and the difference between him
and Bush. 

    Obama will get a nice bump in the polls after
the convention, and have the opportunity to really drag down a McCain
post convention polling bump.  McCain went negative too early.  He went
with personal attacks too early and has no choice but to keep it up. 
Obama will stick with the issues, attacking McCain's policies (look for
that in the debates!), and impugning how up-to-date McCain's grasp of
the issues are, and how carefully McCain's thought about his policy. 
If life starts at conception, do we offer amnesty to all the murderers
since Roe?  If drilling is not a short term solution, not a long term
solution, and insignificantly affects prices, why do it at all? 
Doesn't getting serious about energy diversification do the same thing
to oil markets as threatening to increase supply?  BTW, Obama made a
mistake with Georgia in supporting NATO membership, because now he
can't use Pat Buchanan's line of reasoning.  Having held off going
negative (at least perceptually) and focusing on McCain policy, he can
highlight how his opponent had shifted toward personal attacks, while
he remains on the issues.  He needs to announce something along the lines of "though I didn't want to do it, I'm going to start playing by THEIR rules".  In conjunction, Obama should go very negative
on McCain, attacking his character by highlighting how early McCain
went negative, and how often he's done it.  He will also attempt to
paint McCain as a hothead (currently being done right now).  If Obama
is successful at this tact, this will be one of the first chinks in
McCain's honor armour, to be subsequently exploited by asking McCain to
release his Naval file.  The only weakness in this?  Hillary screws up
his convention bounce.

    This can be the only possibility in
strategy for Obama to pull out of his free fall right now.  Obama's
campaign hasn't been reactionary.  (His daily attack and counterattack
has been largely unimpressive compared to Schmidt's operation)  He
didn't flinch or change strategy at the end of the primaries, because
he had executed his strategy to a T and was impossible to catch up to. 
The general election is a different game entirely and the horse race
matters less.  Obama's campaign can spin a very very convincing
narrative of the hothead, Exxon-John McCain as having sold his soul to
Bush for a shot at the Presidency. 

    So far I see little in
terms of strategy from the McCain campaign, other than trumpeting the
fact that he was a POW, and character assassination.  He's shored up
the GOP base at Saddleback.  He's testing the waters of an acceptable
VP.  John McCain knows that if election coverage were to go anywhere
other than, Obama the man vs. McCain the man, he'd be in trouble.  He
cannot credibly cite that he would do much else differently from the
current Administration.  He has to rely on the GOP to win, and his
administration would be filled with pretty much the same people as the
current administration.  If he maintains the current strategy, there is
a good possibility that he'll run out of attack memes, tarnish his
reputation as a straight-shooter, and lose the election in the last
weeks of the campaign.