14 Days to go; get ready for the mother of all negative campaigns
October 21st, 2008 | by chu |
Slate forecast:
Obama 313
McCain 157
Electoral-vote.com:
Obama 364
McCain 71
I wrote in a previous post that McCain seemed to be running a less intelligent version of the Bush/Rove ‘04 campaign; less intelligent in that the brilliance of Rove’s strategy was to split the message by keeping the “air war” (e.g. TV, convention prime time) positive while using ground war tactics (e.g house parties, direct mail) to go very, very negative on the “moral issues.”
Given the limited number of days left and McCain’s huge money and organizational disadvantage, I expect the 529’s, the RNC and McCain/Palin directly to go massively negative very soon. Expect the TV ads to show Reverend Write, “cling to” and anything else they can use.
The problem with this strategy is obvious – the backlash on McCain from some independent voters could be significant; the energizing impact on Obama’s troops huge. Dwight Gertz, one of my partners at Bain once said “the reason they never invented a nuclear hand grenade is you can’t throw it far enough to keep from blowing yourself up.”
This may be the final gut check for McCain and how he wants to be remembered.
