Will the Election Be About Obama Or McCain?

This is a good point from a Harper's interview with a GOP political operative:

I watched Obama during the debates. Just like everyone else, I said, ‘This guy is good,’ but he also brings serious problems to the table. If you want to reduce political campaigns to marketing, Obama is a great new product with great packaging and people are anxious to try it, but they don’t yet know whether it’s a product they want to use over and over again. People know McCain. He is Coca-Cola. You might not always want a Coke, but you always know what it’s going to taste like and that it’s good when you’re thirsty. These are turbulent times and the safe pick might be the best pick. The race will be about Obama, not McCain, and we still don’t know a lot about Obama. At some point, he is going to have to defend a pretty liberal record in both the U.S. Senate and especially the Illinois Senate. He hasn’t had to do that in the Democratic primaries, but in a general election, his record could cause alarm to those in the middle. He has not gone through the rigors of a general election campaign, which is very different from a primary. He can say in a Democratic primary that he wants to sit down and talk to leaders in Iran, but Republicans and some in the middle hear that and cringe –are we just going to roll over for countries like Iran and let them build a nuclear bomb? I don’t want to diminish the fact that he is a different kind of candidate, but it’s too early to know whether Americans will see him as the right candidate at the right time.

Obama is showing he clearly knows how to run a campaign, and I kinda doubt that he'll fall into the trap of defending himself too much. After all, this election should mostly be about ending the 8 years of Republican misrule, of which John McCain was a part and which he supported. McCain of course has his own image and reputation...but it's as conservative. The conservative brand is severely damaged and Obama and his campaign advisors will have to be idiots not to try to put McCain on the defensive constantly.

That said, fear is a hell of a thing, and McCain could try to scare the living shit out of all of us and win. I campaigned in Virginia and had a couple of good conversations with people still on the fence. One guy echoed this operative's point about knowing what you're getting with McCain, and not really knowing with Obama, and being worried about Iraq "coming back to bite us." Obama will have to deal with this problem and somehow either get everyone to calm down or believe that he's our great defender. I bet he's better at getting us all to calm down and appeal to the "angels of our better nature" and all that.

And we all know how Clinton would respond to fear-mongering- she'd do them one better, says she's better at defending the homeland, like she's done on the Iraq war authorization and the deeming the Iranians terrorists vote. It's this capitulation to fearmongering that got us into this war, and it's my worry that this reflexive response would keep us in it far longer in a Clinton administration than in an Obama one.