Obama's Software Updates, McCain's Hardware Upgrades

* UPDATE @ 4:35 PM EST * - The Mainstream Media Infects Obama Campaign with Virus

Catriona makes a great comment below: McCain is making strategic decisions while Obama can only make tactical shifts. As I point out in a reply to Catriona, one reason why the Obama campaign might be making so many tactical shifts is their over-reliance on getting favorable coverage from the MSM.

Michael Graham makes this point clear in a recently posted op-ed in the Boston Herald:

"I have one piece of advice for the struggling Obama campaign: Fire MSNBC. They’re killing your campaign ..."

"The national media are dominated by enthusiastic Obama supporters desperate to see Obama the Enlightened win the White House, heal our souls, reset our thermostats and shut down the Fox News Channel. And that’s precisely how their coverage of Palin comes across: desperate ..."

"The media has thrown every imaginable charge at Palin, from banning books to cheating her way to the much-coveted title of Miss Wasilla ..."

"The harder the media work to elect Obama, the lower his poll numbers go."

Urgent message to the MSM: please keep on doing what you're doing!

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After the convention, and a wedding I attended right afterwards, I have fully recovered, getting a good 12 hours of sleep last night.

Speaking of recoveries, I'm just as happy as Patrick that the Palin pick has energized the base and has given the McCain campaign a significant boost. But like Sean, I'm still cautious about national polls, and that state polls should be paid attention to. And I'm still doubtful about whether or not this revitalization at the top of the ticket will help downticket, but Reid Wilson and Kyle Trygstad at RealClearPolitics give some hope of a few pickups for us.

While McCain's post-convention bounce was stronger than Obama's, the question is whether or not some of this bounce will have staying power for the next 56 days. Soren notes the 20-point shift in McCain's favor with white women, as well as the independents starting to break for him. But it's not the polls or the major media events that have happened over this past summer that make me optimistic. What makes me confident is the fact that Obama has kept tinkering around with his message without making any significant structural changes his campaign; on the other hand, McCain has made significant structural changes to his campaign when they were necessary, during the primary and right before the convention. Put simply, Obama tries to keep his campaign afloat with "software updates" while McCain has shown the willingness to make "hardware upgrades" to sustain his campaign.

Today, David Brooks takes a mini-historical look at the two campaigns by arguing that in an election year where a vast majority of people think the country is headed in the wrong direction, it's the campaign that provides the most "weirdness" that will achieve victory:

"Last winter, Barack Obama succeeded by running a weird campaign. He wasn’t just a normal politician aiming for office, he was going to cleanse the country of the baby-boom culture war mentality ... But over the course of the spring, Obama’s campaign got less weird ... Instead, Obama’s speeches became more conventional, more policy-specific and more orthodox. His Denver acceptance speech was different from his Iowa speeches. It was more traditionally anti-Republican and pro-Democratic ..."

"As David Broder noted, Obama’s speech 'subordinated any talk of fundamental systemic change to a checklist of traditional Democratic programs.' But by campaigning in this traditional way, Obama ceded the weirdness edge to McCain."

"The old warrior jumped right in ... McCain’s campaign ideology, exemplified in a new ad released on Monday, is not familiar conservatism. It’s maverickism — against the entrenched powers and party orthodoxies."

Here's the bottom line: the Obama campaign's objective each day seems to be to improve in the polls the next day, while the McCain campaign's objective is to win the election.

While the Obama campaign seems to be obsessed with the short term, I give a lot of credit to Steve Schmidt running a tight ship at McCain HQ to focus on the long term. They've kept on message for the most part, and have restructured the campaign in a way that gives them a chance to succeed against Obama's massive grassroots army. Schmidt and the rest of the McCain team seem to have taken advantage of the fact that the Obama campaign thinks that it has to respond to absolutely everything that happens in the world. Jonah Goldberg explains this reactive nature in an LA times column today:

"Thanks to the double-team strategy, Obama has found himself in the awkward position of sounding as if he's running against the GOP's vice presidential nominee. When Obama compared his own experience to Palin's tenure as mayor of Wasilla (leaving out her current job as governor), he ran right into the pick the McCain campaign had set, leaving McCain a clearer path to victory."

"The more Obama has to explain why being a community organizer -- or a state legislator, or a one-term senator with few accomplishments under his belt -- is better preparation for the presidency than being a mayor or governor, the more he volunteers his own shortcomings when compared with McCain."

On the VP selection, it has been well discussed by now the Obama needed to "update" his ticket's resume with the selection of Joe Biden to add some foreign policy gravitas, while McCain made an "upgrade" with Palin supplementing his own "maverickness," a campaign reboot that has brought in more money, more volunteers, and more optimism.

But the most obvious indicator of the Obama campaign's obsession with campaign "software" rather than "hardware" is on the policy front, especially taxes. The editorial board at the Wall Street Journal outlines the significant evolution of Obama's tax policy throughout the campaign:

"Under ObamaTax 1.0, he would have repealed all the Bush tax cuts, lifted the cap on wages subject to the payroll tax, put the top marginal rate up to 39.8% and raised the rate on capital gains and dividends to at least 25% from 15% now. The official campaign line was that tax rates really don't matter to economic growth."

"Summer arrived, the Clinton challenge was history and with the general election ahead came ObamaTax 2.0. It posited that the top rate on capital gains now would be 20%, described on this page August 14 by economic advisers Jason Furman and Austan Goolsbee as 'almost a third lower than the rate President Reagan set in 1986.' This was progress."

"Now with the big vote less than 60 days off and John McCain pounding him as a tax-raiser and pulling ahead in some polls, the Democratic nominee has decided to release ObamaTax 3.0, the most interesting upgrade so far. If the economy is still weak in January, a President Obama might defer all of the planned increases."

Sure, all presidential candidates (including McCain) have made some shifts in messaging. But to see major policy shifts like the one above from Obama is interesting. While the Obama campaign continues to obsess itself with pleasing every audience possible (by being coy at Saddleback while being traditionally partisan in Denver), the McCain campaign is focused on reaching out to the "leaners" and "independents" with a consistent message: the type of change that is needed is the type of change that McCain and Palin have a record of executing.

McCain looked at the numbers and the mood of the country, and quickly realized that changing the message wouldn't be enough, and in fact could be fatal. The campaign installed a new operating system with Palin ... when's the last time you've seen a vice-presidential candidate prominently featured in a late-game campaign ad?

While Obama's focus on software and McCain's focus on hardware has given me new reasons to predict a win for us in November, it also gives me some trepidation in how Obama would govern. Take it from Thomas Sowell today:

"Ordinary working class people did not lead the stampede to Barack Obama, even before his disdain for them slipped out in unguarded moments."

"The agenda of the left is fine for the world that they envision as existing today and the world they want to create tomorrow."

"That is a world not hemmed in on all sides by inherent constraints and the painful trade-offs that these constraints imply. Theirs is a world where there are attractive, win-win 'solutions' in place of those ugly trade-offs in the world that the rest of us live in."

There is some validation to the theory that Obama lives in his own little celebrity world, and his campaign would do anything to protect it. How does this shift into how he would govern? This detatchment from reality, a tethering to a more leftist academic approach to leadership, contributes to a short-term mindset. I can't say that the Right of today is any better when it comes to short-term politics, but John McCain and Sarah Palin, and the rest of us that pay attention to what's next for our movement, have give us a beacon of hope ... the type of leadership that doesn't revolve around personalities, but a type of leadership that centers around issues.

In tough economic times, America can't afford just another software update; it needs to install new hardware. With mavericks on our side, and a Chicago machine politican on the other, who do you think is best able to refresh our country?