Overwhelmed & Unfocused

There may be an additional factor besides the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb that helps explain the McCain collapse and Obama surge (via Newsmax Insider):

Barack Obama has been outspending John McCain on television advertising by a hefty margin of nearly three-to-one — an edge that’s helping to boost the Democrat’s campaign in key battleground states.

From September 30 to October 6, Obama spent more than $20 million on TV ads in seventeen states, while McCain spent only $7.2 million in 15 states, according to Chris Cillizza, who writes “The Fix” column for the Washington Post.

“The spending edge enjoyed by Obama has been used almost exclusively to hammer McCain as both a clone of the current president and someone who is out of touch on key domestic issues — notably the economy,” Cillizza observes.

A principle cause of the campaign shift?  No; but certainly a deft exploitation of it, in combination with an otherwise lower public profile that has protected The One's gaffe-pronedness.

Meanwhile, McCain's hokey-pokeying with the full-Ayers strategy is just the most conspicuous aspect of a distinct fall-off in the quality of his marketing efforts:

Does this look to anybody else like Team Sith is running out of cash and felt compelled to try and cram several offensive/defensive strikes into one thirty-second spot?  Why do so when Barry's Missouri "Truth Sqaud" thuggery is more than sufficient to carry the outraged tenor of the ad?  Why dilute that with three other whiny references that go by so fast nobody who hasn't been closely following this campaign for months will understand what they refer to?

This next "folks" spot is more of the same:

Once again, we have an effective anti-Obama attack angle - the dreaded, but eminently justified "L" word, which still has traction in national elections - that, had it been followed up in the spot by several representative examples, could have been an effective doubt-raiser about B.O.  But instead it swerves off-message into another swipe at Barry's character that, while not inaccurate, derails the desired effect of the ad.

One can envision a McCain ad that drops a blockbuster bombshell about False Messiah having intimate ties with Osama bin Laden and the 9/11 attacks and then ending with, "but that's not what's troubling - what's troubling is that Barack Obama has lied about it!"  Methinks that Sailor's marketing shop, which did such a masterful job of getting him into the lead this summer, is losing itself in its ball-socking narrative and consequently whiffing on one offering after another.

This advertising ineptitude is supremely ill-timed, what with Senator Moneybags poised to purchase election-eve half-hour blocks of prime-time air time to make his "closing argument."  It harkens my memory back to the last weekend of the 1992 campaign when the Bush41 campaign went dark while Team Bubba blitzed the airwaves for the final three days unopposed.

Could Maverick be holding his fire until he sees the whites of Barry's eyes?  If so, what will it matter if (1) he doesn't know in which direction to shoot and (2) he's trigger-shy in any case?