The conventional wisdom in the blogosphere is that McCain has been the more effective attacker in this campaign, and that he has closed the polling gap on Obama as a result of his attacks. The conventional wisdom in the legacy media is only slightly different: Obama hasn't sufficiently introduced himself to voters, and McCain is gaining in the polls as a result of worries about Obama.
However, by actually looking into the numbers, Charles Franklin determine these narratives are both wrong (emphasis mine):
A little interesting movement in views of the candidates has taken place since the end of the primaries in June. All three candidates, McCain, Obama and Clinton, have seen rises in their favorable ratings and an initial decline in unfavorable views though with a slight upturn recently. McCain and Obama are enjoying essentially identical ratings, with 60% favorable and only 35% unfavorable. Even after a significant amount of negative portrayals of him in RNC and McCain ads, Obama's rating has risen over the summer, and so has McCain's.
A candidate with a 60%-35% favorable / unfavorable rating--and rising--is suffering neither from insufficiently introducing himself to the public, nor smarting from effective attacks from his opponent. Yeah, McCain's attacks have been so effective that people have an even more favorable opinion of Obama than before those attacks began. Yeah, Obama has done such a poor job introducing himself to the country that he has a 100% name ID, but only 35% of the country holds an unfavorable opinion of him.
Both narratives are simply wrong, and can be quantifiably debunked. The real problem the Obama campaign is facing is that, in a year when Republicans are incredibly unpopular, he is matched up against a very popular opponent. Obama's attacks are either not common enough, or simply not good enough. Either way, they are ineffective (emphasis mine):
Even after a significant amount of negative portrayals of him in RNC and McCain ads, Obama's rating has risen over the summer, and so has McCain's. (According to the Wisconsin Advertising Project, which monitored and coded all 100,000 ad airings in June and July, one third of McCain's ads contained negative information about Obama and 100% of RNC ads were negative. In the same two months, 10% of Obama's ads mentioned McCain.)
McCain is really popular, and becoming more so. In the meantime, we have not attacked him very much, thus posing no real counter to his high favorable rating.
That is why I said that we needed to spend more than half of our time at this convention attacking McCain. People know, and like Obama. Unfortunately, people also like McCain. You can't realistically hope to improve much on a 60%-35% national favorable ratio, since that is about the margin that LBJ defeated Goldwater, and Nixon defeated McGovern. Really, 60%-35% is as big as a majority coalition will get in this country. However, you can realistically hope to do significant damage to your opponent's 60%-35% ratio. There is a helluva lot more space to fall from that number than there is to rise.
I'm counting on Bill Clinton and Joe Biden to really rip McCain to pieces tonight. Even beyond the convention, it is essential that the Obama campaign start spending at least 50% of its paid media on attacking McCain. There is just much, much more room to move in that direction than in building Obama up. People already know and like Obama. Let's work to make sure that they know McCain, but don't really like him. |
