As the 2008 Presidential Election draws to a close, there has been much said and written about Republican Candidate for President John McCain's campaign strategy to climb back into the race. As of the writing of this article, McCain finds his campaign behind by anywhere from 4-14 points nationally. He also faces seemingly insurmountable odds in nearly every battleground state, as Democratic Party Candidate Barack Obama (D-IL) continues to smother McCain with a combination of an unprecedented ground game and a flood of advertising backed by Obama's grass-roots fundraising success.
However, this article will take a turn from conventional, ratings-driven mainstream media efforts to examine what McCain can do to erase Obama's present lead. Instead, it will focus on what Obama needs to do to expand his lead and drop the hammer on John McCain in the weeks to come. To do so will require a discussion of just three salient areas of focus: narrative, media, and message strategy
Narrative
The Obama campaign addressed the McCain non-issues of distraction (i.e. ACORN and Bill Ayers) during the course of the last debate. Every focus group conducted during the debate indicated that support for McCain's attacks was less than minimal. Post-debate polls also indicated that the American viewing public thought Obama won the debate convincingly. They expressed this view while at the same time comprehending the obvious fact that McCain was the negative, distraction-laden attack candidate.
Why, then, would the Obama campaign waste a single second sending any of its surrogates or campaign officials to discuss these non-issues in the media?
Democratic Party supporters and the Obama campaign need to recognize that every debate on CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News that focuses on Bill Ayers and/or ACORN is another day that these non-issues become issues in the minds of the American voting public. Right now, Ayers and ACORN are distractions. Give them another two weeks of legitimacy via allowing the narrative to swing away from the economy, education, and health care and they suddenly become important to voters - just as the Swiftboat issue was in 2004.
In order to close the deal, the Obama campaign, its surrogates, and supporters must speak about issues that affect the daily lives of working Americans. The American people need to be reminded that under Bush and McCain's watch, unemployment has risen to 6.1% and wages have either flat-lined or receded the past eight years. They need to be reminded that the number of uninsured Americans has risen to nearly 50 million during the Republican Party's time in the White House. And about that health care issue, how about reminding the American people that, according to a Harvard study, each year, 2 million Americans — those who file and their dependents — face the double disaster of illness and bankruptcy (Warren, 2005)?
Source: http://www.law.harvard.edu/...
In short, the Obama campaign needs to take a page from the Clinton playbook so well chronicled in the documentary The War Room, which detailed Bill Clinton's rise to the presidency by hammering a lasting narrative over and over again: It's the economy, stupid.
Media
Nothing frustrates progressives more than a media that is more focused on ratings and trash than issues. Fox News has made a year out of talking about any non-issue designed to smear, discredit, and castigate Barack Obama. They spent months blathering on about Jeremiah Wright - and now they have made the single focus of their network and its so-called "news" any and every Right-wing non-issue being parroted on conservative talk radio.
Now, the rest of the television media is starting to pick up those non-issues and run with them. Although they are far fairer in their coverage of these non-issues than conservative Fox News, the willingness of CNN and MSNBC to duplicate the sleazy distraction message of the McCain campaign serves to work against a campaign that is focused on true issues that affect the lives of the American people.
Given those recent developments, I would suggest the following plan of attack where the media is concerned: economy...health care....economy...health care....economy...health care...
It is implausible, unreasonable, and destructive to expect Democratic Party surrogates and supporters to avoid the media for the last two weeks if they insist on talking about non-issues like Wright and Ayers. However, nothing restricts what Obama supporters talk about on these new outlets. Whenever someone asks about Ayers, simply say that you and the American people aren't interested in the irrelevant politics of distraction, but rather real issues that affect their daily lives like jobs, wages, health care, and education. Just as Hannity and the rest of the Republican stooges flood their own airwaves with rants about non-issues, Democratic Party supporters need to flood theirs with suffocating messages about true issues. In the end, just as those issues overwhelmed the Bush Sr. smear tactics of 1992, the economy, health care, and education will swamp McCain - who will look more like someone scared to address real issues instead of the 'maverick' he claims to be.
Message Strategy
The tendency to sit on the ball is a natural one. Every leading campaign has at least some small fear that a fatal mistake will undo the progress that it has made during the previous several months. However, this isn't the primary. This is a general election - where no lead is safe until a winner has been declared on Election Day.
Obama features a superior ground game, superior funding, and virtually unlimited access to any and all media sources. There is literally no practical upper limit as to how many voters he can reach in the last two weeks of the campaign. It's time to deploy those resources and launch an unstoppable offensive reminiscent of General Patton's campaigns in World War II.
Patton made famous a quote that needs to be etched in the minds of Obama supporters nationwide:
"Always take the offensive...Never Dig In."
By launching an offensive of great magnitude, Obama will replace any notion of "coasting to victory" with a mantra more suited to the Obama campaign's "unconquerable soul of man".
This is not an article of overconfidence. It is a commentary on the path to victory on the part of Barack Obama. The Obama campaign has a vastly successful message that reaches the very voters who can close the deal on Election Day. However, that message doesn't mean anything if it isn't driven into the minds of working-class Americans 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The attack needs to be relentless. The message needs to be suffocating. The distractions by McCain need to be dismissed. If the soldiers of the Obama election army mobilize and stay on the offensive, there is no force on Earth that can stop the march to the presidency.
http://democratictribune.com/...
UPDATE:
Apropos McCain's absurd and offensive comment that middle class tax relief amounted to "welfare", Barack Obama has battered McCain in a speech today that may represent Round 1 of 15 on this issue. Could it be possible that the worm has turned and the offensive has begun?