I received this e-mail today from my friend Bill, a committed Obama supporter:
Need to vent …..You and I have seen the Rove machine in action before, but I want to shove my head through a wall. Apparently Johnny Mac can say anything on his commercials with no relation to the truth, and just rely on this public perception of him being an honorable man. Even though I’ve seen a few good (AP, CNN) stories debunking his lies, his campaign keeps spewing them out there. From Barack raising taxes (warm up act), to ‘his’ sex education to minors (main course) to his ‘disrespectful’ (for desert, and it sounds a lot like uppity to me), I’m in the panic camp. Barack needs to change the game, just pointing out the tactics isn’t going to get him any ground, and pushing out his commercials pointing out McCain’s hypocrisy I can’t see gaining any ground as well. The media just reports this stuff as ‘he said, he said’, he needs something that will hit the news cycle like the faux pig/lipstick outrage. Have some of his military supporters cut a commercial talking about Mc’s ‘loss of honor’, have a mother & child (ala Move On) talking about how the bill protected her child from sexual predators. I’m really in full panic, he needs something big. Once the ‘meme’ is set, it’s hard to shake it off. I see now where ‘outraged’ Repubs are now using shorthand (He called her a pig), Hannity throws ranting and merging Wright and Ayers, saying how Barack was ‘involved’ with them for 20 years. I see Obama putting the fight on more than Kerry and Gore, but that still wont’ be enough, it’s very disheartening to watch.
I feel his pain. Here is my response:
I agree with Rachel Maddow. It is time to call a lie a lie and stop pussyfooting around.
The thing about all of this is that we are only one week out of the conventions and the Palin Effect remains an unknown. I suspect the campaign is just starting to figure out what needs to be done. I would probably do a few things:
1. Go hard after McCain and show that his views are outside the mainstream (abortion, tax cuts) and that he appears willing to say and do almost anything to win. Remind people that McCain announced his candidacy on Leno. Remind people that McCain essentially has been running for president since 2000, that his “put country first” has not been true of McCain since he entered the Senate.
2. Use the Gibson interview to demonstrate that Palin not only has no experience in foreign affairs but seems to have not been paying attention to foreign affairs at all during her political lifetime. Run the clip where she essentially endorses war with Russia over Georgia — and remind people that her view is actually consistent with McCain’s. Run an ad that shows smiling high school kids and ask the public if they are truly willing to put their adolescents’ lives in the hands of candidates who seem all too willing to send the troops in.
3. Remember Clinton. This election is about the economy. Hammer the economic message. Go after McCain for his healthcare tax — he wants to tax nonwage benefits at a time when most of us are underinsured — and tie it to his plan to extend the Bush tax cuts and the Obama plan to cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans. Run ads showing how unserious McCain is — “Bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran,” the off-color jokes — and ask whether he has the temperament to be president.
4. Connect with voters. Obama seems to have forgotten what got him to the nomination in the first place, having been knocked off-balance by Hillary Clinton. He needs to resume the big events and talk about what he envisions government’s role to be in people’s lives and contrast it with the last eight years. And he needs to steal Reagan’s line and ask if we are better off now than we were in 2000 and whether anyone in their right mind thinks we will be better off in 2012 if we do not break with the Bush playbook — which, based on what McCain is actually talking about doing, can only be accomplished by electing Obama.
I do think the media has been better, but it still avoids calling a lie a lie and it still follows what Paul Begala on Maddow’s radio show yesterday calls the big four: scandal, gaffes, polls and ads. If the media is going to focus on those four things, then the Obama campaign needs to craft its message and its response to McCain to fit the paradigm.
What does anyone else think?
Hank Kalet 
I think it matters little what Obama says or does, compared to what the media says and does. The focus ought to be on reinforcing the so far small changes in media behavior. Of course Obama has to continue conventional campaigning before crowds, but that\’s a given.I\’m thinking this way on account of an observation I have made about political protest. People complain that we aren\’t out in the streets protesting about everything bad, when in fact there have been some impressive protests in recent years. A march in the streets, however, is not an end in itself; it\’s main purpose is to get itself into the news, and that doesn\’t work anymore. The media won\’t cover it, so it doesn\’t make much of a difference whether you had 100, 1000, 10 thousand, 100 thousand, 1 million people in the streets, because it won\’t be reported on. What you need now to be heard is a rapidly organizing and re-organizing Internet presence, such as the one that forced Nancy and Steny (with Obama\’s help) to ram through the FISA-gutting bill Hastert-style, and with much bad publicity, instead of routinely and with practically no reporting on the matter.(The quickly organized anti-FISA-gutting coalition chose Chris Dodd to ask for help, and he admirably agreed. It took almost no time at all.)