Here is an interesting tidbit. By a 9-4 ratio, McCain is mentioning Obama more than Obama is mentioning McCain.
John McCain's campaign website has 5,540 mentions of Obama, and 21,900 mentions of McCain. That comes out to a 4-1 ratio of McCain's campaign talking about himself versus talking about Obama.
Obama's campaign website, by contrast, has 5,680,000 mentions of Obama, and 628,000 mentions of McCain, for a 9-1 ratio.
Adjusting for the relative size of each campaign website, I believe this means that, by a 9-4 ratio, McCain is mentioning Obama more than Obama is mentioning McCain. Invariably, when one mentions the other, it is to attack him.
If Obama loses this campaign, it will be because of this gap in attacks. Some may argue that Obama is constrained in his ability to attack McCain, because he is African-American. Whether or not that is true, and I doubt that it is, Obama restricted attacks on McCain by cutting off funding for progressive 527's back in the spring. Those are organizations that would have done very little, except attack McCain.
I don't think it is hard to imagine that the past four weeks, which generally have not been great for Obama, would have been very different if well-funded 527's like Vote Vets and Progressive Media USA were flooding the airwaves and appearing on news programs with attacks on McCain. As it is, Obama's relative reluctance to go on the attack, combined with severely weakened progressive advocacy organizations, is the main reason why McCain has been able to dominate the terms of the debate lately. And no, as at least one person has argued, this is not the fault of the blogosphere:
Among an avalanche of other examples, here you have CBS unethically hiding an importantly dishonest McCain answer on the surge timing vis-à-vis the Anbar Awakening, you have AP Washington bureau chief Ron Fournier writing love notes to Karl Rove and having been in negotiations to join McCain's campaign press staff, and it's not even close among Democratic voters that the press favors Obama. That's called utter failure of the Democratic blogosphere to influence the debate on press favoritism. Democratic bloggers and television analysts need to accept that if they want to fight this battle they need to scrap the entire ineffective strategy they're using and start from scratch.
If you cut off your main attack dogs, you are going to start losing debates in the media. This was a conscious decision by the Obama campaign, one that I think a majority of bloggers opposed. If along with a couple of MSNBC pundits, the progressive blogosphere functions as the entire progressive media operation for this cycle, then we will be seriously outgunned by the massive conservative media operation.
Of course we are losing debates--we through away our best weapons. If Obama loses this campaign, it will be just as much his fault for de-funding the 527s as it will be for the media buying into McCain's attacks. In fact, the entire reason you fund the former is because, by now, all Democrats should expect the latter.
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