Now that balloons and confetti are being swept away we have now officially entered the general election season...60 days till its over. Actually it is much shorter than that as the mail-in ballot phenomena is spreading like wild fire through out the land, but the narrative will be in play for the next 60 days. What is evident outside the speech rhetoric, the surrogates selling of their talking points, the advertisements is the campaign itself. To me the most ironic and telling metaphor was Hillary Clinton's 18 million cracks, not what they want to insinuate but what it really represented, the 18 million cracks of her campaign running effectively. Howard Wolfson's recent piece in WaPo when he reflectively admitted that her campaign was inherently flawed from the inside:

From the outside, our loss may have seemed inevitable for months, but inside the campaign we simply kept going. Each late victory brought false hope. We were finally doing too well to stop, but never well enough to win. We fought so long because we believed so strongly in our candidate; sustained by the passions of our supporters, we hoped that, as long as we kept moving, we could keep failure at bay.

Once we ran out of states and the campaign ended, we were like Rip Van Winkle. We awoke to a world transformed by political currents we had stood against. There was the neighbor in an Obama T-shirt getting the morning paper. Every parked car on the street bore an Obama bumper sticker. Had they been there along, or did they pop up overnight?

Yes Howard we all knew you were asleep last winter and spring especially when in wore that ugly ski sweater on MSNBC's "Morning Joe" (actually I call it Morning Mika...she is far more insightful).  But here is the real revelation of Howard in that article:

No one in recent history had attempted this kind of a political conversation with 75,000 people.

Actually it was a few more, an estimated 84,000, I was there and I watched as the Obama staff organized the event from the inside out. I have also watched and experienced first hand how they have built this campaign social/political movement since January 2007, they have done everything right---period.

Now here we are, September 5th and the day following the RNC Convention and the reflection of their presentation. Here we have this giant "blue screen" this virtual reality machine or backdrop that looked overwhelming in the hall and weird or non effectual on TV. Before the convention there was a story about how simple (Midwestern) the stage craft was intended, simple lines almost Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired but then there was this giant computer-gamed screen.

Now we hear this faux pas....the weird out of place image of Walter Reed Middle School as a backdrop during McCain's most important speech....what and why was it there? Education and school vouchers? Example of a house he doesn't own? The military hospital?  A MISTAKE....could it be simple unintended rush to plagerize an image off the internet that looked good? Well this is not far fetched for here in Colorado the Ohio import former Republican Congressman used a picture of Denali saying it was Pikes Peak and of course his staff didn't know or liked the other image better for their sell job---either way Schaeffer's effort was indicative of his stupidity.

What I am saying is the campaign, how it is managed, how it presents itself, how it plans and adjusts to the competitive nature of the market place and situations is indicative as how the team will manage the nation when elected. This is no different in business when you make a big pitch for a client's business but this is not the cold bottom line of business it is the emotional world of politics.

Obama and its campaign however is well positioned. Tonight my small team, one of three in our State Representative District, which is part of the volunteer network that has 8 field operations in our city of 300,000 is having an organizational meeting and party where fifty people are committed to showing up. Fifty regular folks who will make phone calls, knock on doors and register more voters while John McCain flies into Colorado Springs in the morning. They plan on having 10,000 people at a hanger in the Colorado Springs airport that took them 4 days to distribute. They gave them to anyone who walked in, including me, well I know they will have 9998 persons there, actually much less for I know many Democrats, Independents who got tickets and have no intentions on going. To be honest I got the tickets for my Republican friend who isn't motivated to make the effort. 

Anyway Obama by contrast had 84,000 to show up in Denver, 36,000 from Colorado who got tickets and over 150,000 who requested them online. Tickets were so valuable they had to use anti-scalper interdiction tactics where people were said to want to pay $150 for a seat behind the stage. It was a well healed and well organized event while McCain can barely give away his tickets during his convention in the Reddist Base city in America.

So what is this telling you about each team, each campaign and each leader?

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