Some of the pundits have been arguing whether this is 1980 or 1988.
In 1980, which I remember well, the news magazines prepared cover stories for two outcomes--a Carter re-election or a Reagan upset. Yes, it was close enough to the Watergate hangover, etc. that a Reagan victory was considered to be somewhat dicey. The conventional wisdom is that undecided voters who had been told that Reagan was incompetent, stupid. etc. were reassured through the debates that Reagan was not some crazy idealogue. And it did not hurt that the guy was all about affability. He did not even have to parade a "picture book family" around.
Obama has done everything that Reagan did, and more.
Or is this 1988, as "Morning Joke" has been trying to characterize it for several weeks? The pupils of the late Lee Atwater who trashed McCain in 2000 are hired by McCain to trash Obama, and a dopey right wing female running mate is WAY more effective than Dan Quayle's attacks on "Murphy Brown".
I think it is 1980, and the new ad by Obama, which I hope will flood the airwaves for the next four weeks, will close the deal.
Obama's new ad is here on Politico's site. Short, straight to the point.
http://www.politico.com/...
It's a great ad, but ironically, those of us who may have wondered why Hillary Clinton hung around for so long, and maybe thought she should have dropped out, should now thank our lucky stars that she stayed in to the end. Those debates and contests allowed many mainstream voters to get to know Obama and to be comfortable with him.
OK, maybe that was not her intent and certainly not that of her husband--and look for him to step up his enthusiasm for Obama in the coming weeks. But it seems fairly certain that the best thing that happened to Obama was the loss in NH--and maybe even the later losses in states where the mainstream media kept repeating the conventional wisdom that Obama had not connected with white blue collar voters.
Hillary's hanging around made it necessary for Obama to have the organization in many of the "battleground states" that are currently in play, and made it necessary for him to campaign in those states. And Hillary has been very effective campaigning for Obama. See that here:
http://www.hillpac.com/...
So while I worry about the "Bradley effect" and lots of other things, I think we are looking at an election like that in 1980. The smears are not going to work as they did in 1988 and 2004. They are looking more and more like Bush I's lame attacks on Clinton/Gore: "My dog Millie knows more about foreign policy than these two bozos" or Dole's grumpiness in 1996: "Where's the outrage?"
Let's hope to see the new Obama ad--and likely some complementary ones--as Obama's team closes the deal.