In the comments to this Kospost, the comment community wonders if the protracted campaign wars have been good for Obama.
The answer is yes.
I make the case that the protracted campaign has both developed and demonstrated Obama's resilience,and that part of Obama's resilience is his appeal to the visual cortex.
The extended campaign has both developed and demonstrated Obama's resilience. I have another confession--I am a gamer, I play Warcraft, and I think that the Warcraft definitionis particularily apt.
Resilience is a character attribute that reduces the chance to receive critical strikes or spell critical strikes, reduces the effect of mana drain spells, reduces the damage taken from critical strikes and spell critical strikes, and reduces the damage taken from damage over time effects.
Characters have no innate resilience. It can only be gained through external sources, e.g., equipment, elixirs, enchantments, gems and some spell effects that grant resilience rating. Many items and recipes that grant resilience rating are PvP rewards.
hehe.
Not only am I probably too un-PC and too low-verbal to be a diarist here, but i may be too immature. ;)
Anyways, the protracted campaign has generated a lot of resilience for Obama.
This is my favorite poll average.
If you follow the blue line, you can see how Obama consistantly recovers from negative news events.
The opposition is still looking for that "killer gaffe".
During this election cycle, conservatives have consistently underestimated Barack Obama. There have been numerous occasions in which Obama said things that conservatives were convinced would be damaging, even fatal, to his campaign, and so far they have been proven wrong every time. When Obama said in the YouTube debate he would meet with a rogues gallery of foreign leaders, many conservatives thought he shot himself in the foot, but he turned the uproar to his advantage; when the Jeremiah Wright controversy broke out, many conservatives predicted it could finish him, but there's not much evidence it did anything other than cause a short-lived dip in the polls; and most recently, many conservatives, including myself, believed that his elitist remarks in San Francisco would damage him, but so far there isn't conclusive evidence to suggest it has.
Resilience is Obama's strongest advantage.
And part of that resilience is appeal to the visual cortex.
Homosapiens sapiens makes a lot of judgements on visuals.
It's our wiring, part of the survival mechanism.
If you read Geheraghty's Horserace post that I linked, he misses the point. He says that killer gaffes are only detectable in hindsight. But what i noticed....is that "killer gaffes" are often visual.
Kerry on the windsurfer.
Dukakis in the tank.
Obama's physical appearance is part of his resilience. He is handsome and graceful and young. Appearing for speeches and debates will push the blue line up some reguardless of content. Because our visual cortext preempts the other systems.
When McCain and Obama start appearing on the same debate stage, Obama will get a huge boost from appearance alone.
Thirty percent of Americans polled are concerned that McCain is too old.
I predict that percentage will increase as the un-PC topic of age surfaces more and more.
No amount of positive press or airbrushing is going to make McCain look any younger. And his unreleased medical reports may have have some nasty surprises.