With a month to go and mounting evidence that both McCain and the Republicans are slipping badly in the polls, you can bet that we are going to see a sustained and vicious assault on Obama for the next thirty days. Indeed, the McCain campaign has more or less telegraphed its intentions in this regard.
I think for many of my contemporaries this sort of thing is anxiety producing. We are used to such tactics bearing fruit for the GOP. A lot of us have had out faith in our fellow citizens shaken over the last few decades as we have watched one bullshit right wing meme after another find fertile soil with key parts of the electorate, particularly my fellow white men.
So I suspect that in the next few weeks you might think that instead of Obama-Biden, that the ticket is Obama-Ayers, Obama-Wright, Obama-Rezko, hell, maybe Obama-Osama or Obama-Marx. This time, however, I am not terribly concerned. I feel like these tactics have lost a great deal of their potency -- and in fact, may well backfire in a time of great economic anxiety. I also think that the changing electorate is far less susceptible to this claptrap than that which bought into the ugly Lee Atwater campaign of 1988. (We should also remember that the Democrats won the popular vote for the presidency in 1992, 1996, and 2000, and that Kerry lost by a pretty narrow margin during a time of war -- in other words despite the mainstream media's incessant portrayal of the Dems as losers, that has not really been all that true since the 1980s.)
In the end, I have a lot of faith in the appeal of both our policy positions and our candidate. I think Obama and his team have stayed a step ahead of everyone throughout this race. They have stayed cool at all times and they have done the hard work of establishing a ground game that is going to really impress everyone come election day. So keep the faith while you keep working hard. We're going to win this thing and it is going to be a very sweet day for us all.
