Obama Strategery

There's a lot of back & forth about the day to day poll numbers and various tempests in microscopic teapots that make for plenty of blog-fodder among people following the presidential campaign closely. Most of this is just inside-baseball for whatever the political equivalent of 'technorati' is, and I don't have strong opinions about the details. Ok, i do, but not strong enough to blog everyday about. I mean McCain's dogwhistle politics probably deserve some sort of push-back. I mean, how many different ways will they find to spell 'uppity'? This week its 'presumptuous'. Whatever. In general its hard to criticize Obama's campaign on tactical grounds - he's raising a ton of money and building a huge ground organization, and he's doing it in more than just the 'swing states' that democrats are always focusing on. The problem I have is that they haven't developed a narrative for their criticism of McCain. While there's plenty of substantive grounds to criticize McCain, the key to a good message machine is to have a theme and keep pushing it so that everything you're doing becomes reinforcing. The republicans seem to understand this instinctively now. They pick a theme and they keep hammering it regardless of how accurate or relevant it is to the target, or the topic at hand. Flip-flopper, elitist, uppity, whatever it is they're pushing it and it doesn't matter what the topic is. I haven't seen such a theme emerge yet from the Obama side, but I have an idea: McCain is 'confused'. I think this is a theme that will carry a lot of resonance with voters - its a way of making McCain look old and doddering without making it explicit, and it allows Obama-ites to point out inaccuracies without calling McCain a liar. Is Obama a 'political celebrity' ? No, John McCain is just confused - who's hosted SNL? Who's made for guest appearances on tv shows? Who's been a political headliner since the '80s?