dailykos diaries often remind me of the column that Variety editor in chief Peter Bart, a former studio executive, used to write for Weekly Variety, where he handed out advice to those who did not ask for it: They read like uncommissioned campaign strategy memos written in the hope that someone at Camp Obama will read it, pick up the good advice and turn it into a winner for the campaign. Less ambitious diarists settle for well-intentioned attempts to police their fellow bloggers by handing out advice as to what to write about and how.
This is one such diary. But it's very brief.
As Robin Abcarian and Peter Wallsten point out in today's LA times, McCain has taken the experience issue off the table. Attacking Obama on his lack of experience was a loser; McCain's only shot at winning now is to out-Hope-Change-and-Believe the Hope-Change-and-Belief agent. McCain's new campaign meme is reform: Palin is the REAL agent of change, the All-American (all white, all gun-toting, sports-loving, highly reproductive) agent of change. She is Obama minus all that heartland Americans find disquieting about him:
http://www.latimes.com/...
I still believe that the Palin pick is principally geared to white conservative middle-class men who do not want to vote for a black man, but now have a chance to embrace "change" by casting their vote for a white woman. And there is a fantasy angle to this, too: If you want to spell it out bluntly, Palin offers white men a chance to save a white woman from a black man. For this audience, once the Obama campaign starts attacking Palin casting their vote for Palin is a "Birth of a Nation" style ride to the rescue of the All-American white girl in distress. I think this is why Obama has not frontally attacked Palin and will not go there for the rest of the campaign.
Unless you want to simply ignore her (which is difficult given the kind of traction she is getting with her target audience), and assuming that Abcarian's and Wallsten's analysis is correct, the only way of attacking Palin is questioning her credentials as a reformer.
There is some substance to that claim, mainly that she was for the bridge to nowhere before she was against it.
More importantly, this means that you should drop or scale back all other lines of attack, particularly the inane discussion about whether or not her baby son is her child or her daugther's. That one is definitely a trap.
UPDATE: The Dems are onto it: http://www.washingtonpost.com/...