Since the republican convention, Obama suppporters have called on him to attack McCain hard, to go negative, negative, negative. Otherwise, the fear is that Obama will look weak and ineffectual, ala John Kerry in 2004 and Michael Dukakis in 1988.
Here's the problem - in trying to protect Obama from being portrayed as weak, these vociferous critics are actually helping to portray Obama as weak. When his supporters keep saying he needs to be tougher, attack harder, that's just another a way of saying, stop being weak. And if someone needs to be told to be tougher, then, how strong is he, really?
Ultimately, all this arm-chair campaign managing is counter-productive, mostly because it just creates more noise, joining in together with the noise produced by the McCain campaign, and all that we get is, well, more noise. And, given how well Obama has done doing things his way, given a choice, I'm going to try to drown out the noise from both sides and stand by Obama. More below.
I've never seen so much second-guessing of a presidential candidate and his campaign, and I've also never seen so much of that second-guessing turn out to be wrong.
Go back to the primaries - people criticized Obama for being too soft on Hillary, saying he should have hit back harder against her negative campaigning. Well, Obama was right, the critics were wrong. He won the race, and he didn't further antagonize Clinton supporters unnecessarily, and made the process of reuniting the party that much less difficult.
People and pundits criticized the democratic national convention on the first couple of days, saying there should have been more McCain bashing, and it shouldn't be left up to Obama to do the attacking. Obama ultimately was vindicated while the critics were wrong. His acceptance speech was powerful, and his critiques of McCain were made more that much more powerful because they hadn't been diluted by similar critiques leading up to his speech.
Now, with McCain and Palin, we hear the same thing - attack now, and attack hard. Of course, Obama is receiving conflicting advice, as some say attack Palin harder, while others say attack McCain and ignore Palin. Meanwhile, Obama, obviously realizing that the state of the election is in tremendous flux right now, isn't panicking, and letting things settle down a bit before setting on a clear response tactic.
What I see the Obama campaign doing now is testing various lines of attack against McCain/Palin and waiting to get a clearer sense of McCain/Palin's weaknesses. The campaign knows that they have a treasure chest full of Palin gaffes and scandals to create counter-narratives. It makes sense not to hit back hard but blind as so many suggest.
We'll see. Let's check back after the first debate and see whether Obama made the right strategic moves or not.