Crossposted at Strategy08.
Link.
My thoughts on the Obama Response team so far:
I agree with Dan (my fellow blogger at Strategy08) that the original response ('Oops') to McCain's latest silly ad was mostly on the mark, but Obama needs to do more. Much more. I generally disagree with Armando over at TalkLeft (he seems to be hypercritical of Obama), but his criticism of Obama on his response strategy has some merit.
I've come around to the thinking that the Obama team response to McCain's ridiculous attacks (up until this excellent ad) was not sufficient by a long shot. McCain's Ads are indeed awful, but firing off press releases was simply not enough. There needs to be a series of hard-hitting response Ads from the Obama camp, and this ad is a great start. I think McCain's attacks are driving up his negatives, but I somewhat agree that it may have an effect on the polling. We can't hope for the media to do their job all of the time. This is the time when candidates get defined, and Obama isn't doing enough to define McCain.
David Axlerod went on the attack on this today. Good, but we need more, however. Response Ads are the key, and this is a good start.
Minor update: Being pleased with this hard-hitting response, I've somewhat modified my criticism. One of the benefits of waiting to respond was that they got a huge handful of media quotes to use in blasting McCain. Obviously, we can't count on the media doing their jobs all the time, but in this case, it certainly added a bunch of ammo for Obama to use in this ad. I've also deleted to blockquote from talkleft and just linked to the relevant passage so you can read it if you want, instead of foisting it upon you. ;)
Another update: On Race for the White House, Rachel Maddow just delivered the ultimate smackdown on the current media meme about Obama being "arrogant" (read: uppity). She blasted Milbank and Buchanan in devastating fashion.