The Wrong Strategy

The Politico reports the following:

As Sarah Palin transforms herself from obscure Alaska governor tothe Republican Party's newest rising star and most effective attack dog, Barack Obama's campaign will largely sit back, watch her rise and hope she falls.

The Obama campaign has no silver bullet to use against the Palin. Instead, Obama has decided to largely avoid directly engaging her and will instead keep his focus largely on John McCain and on linking the Republican ticket to President George W. Bush. The Obama campaign will leave Palin to navigate the same cycle of celebrity that Obama has weathered, and the same peril that her nascent image will be defined by questions and contradictions from her Alaska past.

Attention Obama campaign: this is an exceptionally ill-advised strategy. Yes, it's possible that new dirt about Palin will be uncovered or she will commit a few "potatoe" moments on the campaign trail and end up being a drag on the ticket. But sitting around and hoping that something like that will happen is not a good plan. Here's why.

John McCain's decision to pick a running mate who is virtually unknown to most Americas and members of the media provided the Obama campaign with a rare opportunity. It's very seldom in politics that you get the chance to define your opponent at the ground floor level. Right now, the public image of Sarah Palin is still very much in flux. Opinions of her, both among voters and members of the media, are not fully formed. They're just impressions that haven't yet hardened.

But it doesn't take long for impressions to harden and once they do, they're very hard to budge. That's why John McCain is still perceived to be a "maverick" and a "straight-talker" in the minds of many voters, even though it's been years since he did anything to warrant those descriptions.

I understand the tendency among long time political veterans to discount the importance of the vice presidential pick. Vice presidential candidates usually don't end up making much of a difference even when they're poorly received (see, e.g., Dan Quayle). But there's good reason to believe this year will be very different. First, there's no precedent for Palin. She's a young, socially conservative woman who has instantly reached rock star status among movement conservatives and has dominated news coverage. She's not going to disappear into the background as running mates often do. Second, and more importantly for the Obama campaign, there's reason to believe that--if defined effectively--she could become a major drag on the Republican ticket.

Nate Silver breaks down the day-by-day data for both the Rasmussen and Gallup daily tracking polls and what he finds is interesting. Obama's best day of polling, by far, was the day that news of Bristol Palin's pregnancy broke. He was up +10 and +11 in those polls respectively. You have to be really careful reading too much into polls, but if I had to guess, I'd say that news of Palin's daughter's pregnancy underscored in people's minds the fact that they really didn't know anything about this woman and probably caused them to question McCain's judgment in choosing her.

But since then, Palin has been introduced to the country in a very carefully choreographed way. The McCain campaign is trying hard to define her to the public as a reformer, a maverick from the Wild Frontier, a sort of Davy Crocket-like figure. And judging from the movement in the tracking polls, it seems to be working.

But the doubts are still there. Impressions are fresh. Opinions are still in the formative stage and can be changed. But that's not going to happen unless the Obama campaign makes an affirmative effort to do so. They have to try to define her and they only have a narrow window of time to do so. They need to push back against the reformer/maverick image that the McCain campaign is constructing and raise doubts about her readiness to be president. They also need to aggressively highlight the parts of the Palin myth (e.g. the Bridge to Nowhere) that are outright lies. She is not a straight-talker, and voters need to know that.

Obviously the Obama campaign needs to be careful about how they do this, but that's no excuse for not trying. If they can succeed in planting doubts about her in the minds of independents and swing voters, they'll accomplish two important things: 1) they'll undermine her popularity in her own right, and 2) they'll cause these voters to question McCain's judgment and devalue his experience.

You get very few chances in presidential campaigns to paint on a blank canvass, to influence voters' very first impressions of a rival candidate. That's the opportunity the Obama campaign has been presented with here, and if they just sit back and allow others to do all the painting, it'll be political malpractice.