It’s bound to happen at some time. Here McCain is forced to defend Obama. McCain’s campaign has been hijacked by the team that got Bush elected and now they are using the same flawed tactics. But this time round, it has not really worked well, why ? Because if you’re up against a strong, stable opponent, this doesn’t work. The foundations of Obama’s campaign is strong enough to withstand such attacks from the McCain camp. An election strategy is like a war strategy and McCain’s camp being the side that claims to be more capable militarily obviously doesn’t have much strategic common sense here (that’s why shit happens in Iraq). If Obama’s character is somewhat flawed, yes, you can win by focusing on his character and moral judgement. But Obama is a different politician. He’s smart and he first lays the ground rules by claiming the moral high ground of running a clean campaign and from the looks of it, he has a more disciplined team who tries to avoid wrestling in the mud. Because they know getting into the mud is not to their advantage and also that kind of politics does not benefit the country at all in the first place. Instead he has tried to build his campaign on solid ground.
Now because of this, McCain, who actually should be the frontrunner in this campaign by all counts, has run into a solid Obama defence against his team’s harassment and because of that has seen him slipping into the underdog status. McCain’s team has totally underestimated Obama and misjudged the circumstances of this election. Their seemingly directionless and random assaults against Obama has not worked but instead it shows the general lack of a strategy, vision and discipline by McCain’s team. McCain himself is a decent man and he should be aware that if the smear strategy against Obama doesn’t stick, it can backfire on him like in the video above. His message has also mostly won him the white, ignorant, evangelical, and sometimes extremist segments of the population. What he needs is actually more of the liberal, educated, moderate segments of the population to tip the votes in his favor and his current strategy is totally way off the mark. He is now forced to play on Obama’s ground rules and it’s probably a little too late.
As the art of war says, take the high ground and anchor there, then watch a less capable enemy falter by their own fruitless struggles.
