The conventional wisdom seems to be that if you pump Obama’s negatives, you’ll have a path to the election. Mark Halperin basically suggests this in his bullet points. Stuart Rothenberg is less explicit on this point. This was also the conventional wisdom with Reagan, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. George H.W. Bush did successfully do it. Al Gore was as close as you come to successfully doing it without actually doing it. Bush was going into the weekend before the election with a 2-3% lead. Gore successfully leaked the drunk driving arrest on that weekend, and came within a tenth of a percentage point of winning the presidency.
It is easiest to pump the negatives on candidates without platforms. The breadth is more important than the depth on this point. The whole point of pumping the negatives is to get the voter disillusioned into believing that the candidate won’t be able to deliver on what they promised. The original attempt to pump the negatives on Obama was the War in Iraq. This didn’t work so well for H. Clinton because even if Obama’s position on Iraq is considered impractical, it happens to be the position Democratic activists share. McCain may be able to do this in the general election. There have been signs over the past week that McCain is moving to a disengagement position. I believe he would have to move a little further to disillusion Obama supporters who want the troops brought home. The key to pumping negatives is convincing people that your guy would do no worse than the other guy in reality. Attempting to pump negatives when your guy truly would do worse just reminds people of your guy’s bad position. For H. Clinton, trying to hurt Obama on Iraq just reminds people that her policy is whatever is politically expedient; it is malleable and likely to change.
Going into the general election, I think it helps to remember the other side is paid as well. McCain is susceptible to having his negatives pumped. Pro-life supporters are still weary of supporting him in the primaries. Every week sees another commentary published in a newspaper by a Catholic claiming that the abortion issue is not important in the coming election. If such efforts were actually organized come this fall, this could have a very negative impact on McCain. The other negative for McCain is that he is tone deaf on economic matters. There are a lot of poor people in the GOP, many of them also happen to be the disillusioned pro-lifers mentioned above. Presently McCain doesn’t have an economic message. He needs to get one or he needs to find an enthusiasm for social conservatism. I can very much see Obama’s campaign pumping those negatives.
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