How To Knock Out McCain (or Kick Him While He's Down if That's Your Opinion)

update about 1 hour after I started writing and hadn't posted this yet, I was watching the dodgers and saw this...I saw this ad (that is pretty old but hadn't aired in NV for all I know yet. Puck and I were floored in a good way. Let me know if you had already seen that ad in your state, Biz. Youtube shows it's over three weeks old. I can't believe he'd sit on this so long before airing it over here in a tossup state instead of the usual response to attack type ads. The comments to the vid show a lot of people got as fired up about that ad as I did. Anyways, on to my crazy campaign strategy.

The general attitude of many democrats these last few days or so based on the polling showing Obama increasing his lead seems to be a semi-smug conclusion that the possibility of McCain winning this November is nil. I'm not that optimistic. I think I'd say I'm cautiously optimistic. I'm not elated when I see those polls for a few reasons. I don't think the campaign should start taking its eyes off the ball because the ball has been moving with a lot of late break this last week or two. I don't think Obama's campaign has based on the very brief and shallow depth I got into it. They seem to be extremely aggressive and smart. The importation of Californians into Nevada to try to help win Nevada for Obama still kind of floors me.

I think Obama should re-tool his stump/rally speech. He should go Ross Perot-lite. He should include a huge screen and make his speech interactive. There should be graphs and numbers that compliment the speech Obama already gives. It should have a side-by-side with charts representing the implications of some of McCains policies on certain economic numbers.

It should be like a really large scale powerpoint+campaign speech presentation. Even if the average voter doesn't scrutinize the charts, I believe the use of ultra-hard visual aids at large venues to augment the spoken message by Obama would legitimize and instill confidence in Obama's policies, campaign, and would widen the lead he already has on the economy over McCain. If people respond to this new "speech" and it grabs headlines, people on the fence and the news media will be questioning or expecting some kind of response to what McCain thinks of Obama's numbers and why McCain cannot provide more detailed information in his speeches regarding the economy. His best response would be a "me too" copying of Obama's innovation. Worst outcome would be that Obama's charts are innaccurate without offering any numbers of his own. This strategy I think would be effective because it would at least seem to give the american people what they keep saying they want--specifics they can understand about how bad is the economy and how will your policies fix it--. It is probably even more important in that it pushes the campaign discourse back to the economy and forces McCain to react on the fly.

The biggest mistake either candidate could make would be going too populist. Oversimplifying complex issues can backfire like it eventually did to Ross Perot. McCain has fumbled at it because his message is inconsistent and contradictory, and Obama was kind of already populist by being a democrat, but he hasn't really used the populist angle that much. Numbers that are too easily or quickly debunked/discredited by media is the next biggest mistake a candidate could make because then the candidate loses all credibility and becomes untrustworthy.

I guess if they have more ads like that one off in a can somewhere, I guess they really don't need to attempt to re-invent the wheel a bit to stamp out the last embers of the burnt-out fire that used to be John McMaverick's campaign.