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Meantime, a new CBS poll shows the presidential race tightening. Posted by Laura at October 7, 2008 12:46 AM... If this is the case, however -- and it very well could be -- then this election is over. If the middle class had decided that Barack Obama is their guy, then he's going to win. So assume for a moment that there remain a sufficient number of persuadable voters to provide McCain with a prospective path toward victory.
Even so, I think most observers have tended to overstate the extent to which this election is in fact about Barack Obama. It is also very much about John McCain. As I argued in the Los Angeles Times in August, the principal reason why McCain has been able to remain in a relatively tight race with Obama, even as the Republican brand is in shambles, is because he has largely been able to distance his brand from that of the Republicans. This is evidenced by the fact that polling during the primaries indicated that Obama was in fact headed toward a landslide victory against virtually any other Republican, whether Mike Huckabee or Fred Thompson or Mitt Romney (though the later might have had some interesting opportunities in light of the current economic crisis). By contrast, for all the time her advisers spent trumpeting her electability, Hillary Clinton never had more than a 3-point lead against McCain before exiting he race, and trailed him for much of the primary season.
It may be quite difficult for McCain to attack Obama in this fashion without significantly damaging his own brand. ... What's interesting is that, with the exception of the past couple of weeks, McCain's and Obama's ratings have been fairly strongly correlated, tending to rise and fall together. This is not to say that negative campaigning doesn't work -- it sometimes does -- but it works at diminished efficiency, because you may be giving back 50 cents on the dollar by harming your own approval scores.
If the McCain campaign brings up William Ayers -- or Jeremiah Wright -- it will almost certianly be seen as attack politics. This might seem to be stating the obvious. ...The stories are liable to be reported as a typical partisan attack, which will impeach their credibility in the public's eyes and reduce their staying power. ...
Ultimately, however, the fact that McCain is resorting to these sorts of attacks [is] an indication of just how much his brand has been damaged. They certainly aren't likely to help him to repair it.