As the bounce panic slowly settles, let's remind readers of a very simple fact. Obama is the only candidate who has never had to re-tool his campaign message. In fact, everyone who has come up against him has reached a point where they had to concede that his theme of "hope" and "change" was right, and that theirs was wrong. It happened to Hillary, and she lost. It just happened to John McCain, and he will lose, too.
You will probably argue that low-information voters are going to decide this election, and low-information voters only start to care about the election during or after the conventions. Coming late to the game, they will be confronted with not one, but two candidates claiming the "change" theme, and they will go for the "safe" choice, i.e. the old white guy who was a POW. However, even low-information voters will have heard of Barack Obama before, and they will have heard his campaign slogan.
For whatever it is worth, it gives Obama an important advantage for the rest of the campaign. All he needs to do is stay on message and get the message out. It all boils down to a simple sentence that he has been using in the last few television interviews: "If you liked the last eight years, vote for McCain. If you think that we need to take this country in a different direction, vote for me." For all the McCain-Palin "maverick" brouhaha, he does not e even have to change his line of attack: They ARE more of the same. Even that still applies.
You can get a sense of the strength of Obama's message if you consider the fact that he has been able to reverse his stance on several issues during the campaign without being called out for it. Most notably, these include drilling and the surge. What is remarkable is that the Republicans did not even bother to attack him over these changes. You would have expected the "flip-flop" meme to come up, but McCain remained silent on this. From Obama's position, revising his stance on these issues served to take them off the table in order to get a focus on the issues that really matter. The remarkable thing is that he could pull it off. This seems to indicate to me that his combination of campaign theme and public persona is quite unassailable. He's an agent of change, and he's a cool-headed, rational pragmatist. People know what he stands for, and if he changes his position on a specific issue, he does so in order to strengthen his long-term goal, which is "Change we can believe in".
Now you will probably argue that EMOTIONS will decide this election, and that Obama should show more of them. Maybe so. But then, it is useful to remember that coolness IS an emotional style, and one that is deeply engrained in American culture to boot (if you don't believe me, read Peter Stearns on this). Emotional restraint is a quality. It's all about being "the strong, silent type". Obama is not just not being the angry black man, he is Gary Cooper to McCain's Mr. Magoo.
And what if McCain's campaign manager is right and this election is not about the issues, but about personality? I would argue that Obama has an advantage even in this department. Never having had to re-tool his meesage or to rebuild his campaign persona he will come across as realiable, honest and sincere. All the attacks based on the theme that "we don't know him" aim at this specific quality in Obama (or his public persona; I've never personally met the man…). By comparison, John McCain is a hopeless mess of a candidate, a flawed product that you can only hope to sell through surprise tactics and by assuming that your buyers are not bright enough to notice the inconsistencies.
You could of course argue that Obama's biggest gamble is to assume that American voters are grown up and intelligent people. He does assume that the American people are fundamentally decent, and he does say things like "The American people are not stupid." Now would you prefer to have him talk down to people, or would you prefer him to cynically assume, Steve Schmidt style, that the American people will buy into anything, even blatant lies? I am sure you would not. But before you go into the liberal defeatist mode and lament the fact that honesty does not pay, ask yourself: When was the last time that you heard a major politician address voters as "fundamentally decent" and "not stupid"? Do you really think this makes no difference?
I don't think I am being idealistic here. I just sincerely believe that Obama is in a much stronger position and has a much easier task before him than John McCain when it comes to convincing the undecided voters in the remaining days of the campaign.
In a recent NYT column, Paul Krugman suggested that all that Obama had to do is remind people that he is the Democratic candidate and McCain is a Republican. The fundamentals are all in Obama's favor. Obama's package of personality, theme and emotional style put him in an excellent position to take advantage, one more time, of what has been a very favorable set of circumstances for him so far.