McSame in Virginia

“The fact that even Virginia is up for grabs tells you a lot,” said Josef Jazvic, a 39 years old technology worker, volunteering at the Barack Obama 2008 campaign. “It’s time for a change,” he says to every Virginian offering to register for the presidential elections in November. It’s Fredericksburg Fair and the Friday-crowds enter the fairgrounds in that part that divides the state in the conservative south and the liberal north.
Virginia hasn’t voted for a Democratic candidate since 44 years. GWB carried the state with a 9 and 8 points lead. By now the campaigns of Obama and McCain agree: Virginia is a new swing state, just like Ohio, Florida and other battlegrounds. Where you have to fight there is a burst of political activity. How to win?
Barack Obama has held his first big rally in Prince William County, the second most populous county and thus critical for winning the state. Across the state he opened 28 offices for his 10.000 volunteers to deliver its 13 electoral votes.
McCain’s national headquarter is in Arlington where they try to mobilize the conservative core that other Republicans has taken for granted. Now McCain is seriously considering to pick a Virginian as his running mate and so does Obama too.
Governor Tomothy M. Kaine is a leading contender to be Obama’s running mate and he says: “If you had told me four years ago that a Democratic presidential candidate would be running a competitive race in Virginia and would open 10 offices, I would say that is spectacular.” Perhaps the Obama campaign can duplicate the success of Kaine, Senator James Webb and former Governor Mark R. Warner, leading a Democratic revival that would be complete with a Democratic win on presidential level. There is the lack of Bush’ popularity, the change of demographics in Northern Virginia, the high turnout of younger voters and African Americans and last but not least the giant volunteer base that delivered a big win in the Democratic primary.
The hope of the Republicans is their believe that the state remains inherently conservative, particularly at the presidential issue of national security. Yes, but times are changing.
In Northern Virginia the week of July 21, volunteers ran a nightly phone bank out of offices in Arlington and McLean. They also registered voters at Wolf Trap concerts, movie theaters, grocery stores and a farmer's market. They sent out hundreds of canvassers in the evenings and on weekends, held a house party in Fairfax for the Jewish community, and held issue discussions at restaurants in Arlington and Alexandria. For the past month, much of the Obama campaign's focus has been on registering voters. Virginia has recorded 147,000 new registrations this year -- it does not register by party -- and the campaign's goal is 150,000 more. It estimates that if 80 percent of those new registrants are for Obama, and that if 75 percent show up at the polls, that will mean a gain of more than 60,000 votes -- or an extra 1.75 percent, assuming turnout is around 3.5 million.
To further close the gap, the campaign is targeting what it calls "sporadic" Democrats -- potential supporters who missed at least one recent state-wide race and may need a nudge to turn out for Obama -- plus moderate Republicans and independents who may be tempted to cross over. To reach this second group, the campaign is using "micro-targeting" techniques popularized by the 2004 Bush campaign, divining voters' leanings through consumer preferences or other hints.
"For a race that's going to be as close as this is, it will take a lot of pieces of the puzzle for us to add to be successful," said Virginia campaign director Mitch Stewart, a South Dakota native who helped run Obama's primary campaigns in states including Iowa and Indiana.
For the McCain campaign, the challenge is holding on to as much of Bush's 2004 advantage as possible, particularly by trying to win back voters who favored the president but also voted for Warner, Kaine or Webb. It is being undertaken with a ground operation more limited in scope and more hierarchical than Obama's. The campaign, which as elsewhere is working in close concert with the Republican National Committee, has opened six offices state-wide, with three more on the way, on the theory that Obama's greater visibility is mostly for show and not worth the cost to match.
Its volunteer efforts are directed out of campaign headquarters and are organized into clearly delineated coalitions, such as veterans, sportsmen, social conservatives and young Republicans. On weekday evenings, 30 or so people from one of the groups take over the phones in McCain's offices in Crystal City, where both his national and Virginia headquarters are based.
"We run a very disciplined, methodical, structured organization," said Trey Walker, McCain's Mid-Atlantic director. "We are doing exactly what Republican campaigns have done in the past."

Of course and that will be the problem. It will convince voters that McCain is not someone else, but has to win a third term of the same Bush politics.

The Truth and Nothing But the Truth?

There is a simple fact about elections that has eluded Democrats in every presidential campaign they have lost in the last 40 years: that as a candidate, you have to focus first and foremost not on a litany of "issues" but on four stories: the story you tell about yourself, the story your opponent is telling about himself, the story your opponent is telling about you, and the story you are telling about your opponent. Candidates who offer compelling stories in all four quadrants of this "message grid" win, and those who leave any of them to chance generally lose.
Al Gore didn't tell any of the four. He didn't want to be associated with Bill Clinton (a fatal flaw Obama should not repeat), so he had nothing to say about what his administration had accomplished over eight years of extraordinary peace and prosperity. Even his chief strategist, Bob Shrum, now admits that the campaign suffered from its relentless focus on "issue" positions and policies without weaving them into any coherent story about why Al Gore should be president.
John Kerry told one story--the story of his military bona fides--and left the others to fate (and Karl Rove). He lost when he failed to respond to the two major stories told about him: that he was a flipflopper (a story that started the day he became the presumptive nominee and his campaign never deigned to answer) and the story that he was a fake war hero (a direct contradiction to his only story, which his team thought best to let fester). Neither campaign thought to tell a coherent story about George W. Bush. Try recalling the master narrative either one of them told about their opponent, and see if you can get past the first sentence.
John McCain is telling a story about himself--that he's a man of courage and conviction who loves his country. He is telling a story about Obama--that he's a man of none of those things. Virtually everyone in the country is receiving a barrage of email from anonymous sources detailing this message about Obama without constraints of truth. After watching Hillary Clinton lose to Obama's charisma and after watching Obama enthrall the rest of the world and the troops McCain claims Obama doesn't support last week, he is now in full attack mode, trying to tell a story about his opponent's greatest strength (that Obama is someone who can inspire people, and can even do so on a world stage, where McCain's master narrative had claimed a decided advantage). So now he is telling the story of Obama as an arrogant, uppity, empty celebrity.
The truth and nothing but the truth does not matter. But if McCain is the target the truth is good enough. You have to tell the story about that old loser who is a notorious liar as he always has been. About his heroism. Is losing a war, while you are shot down and within four days mentally broken by interrogators, is that making you such a fabulous hero, that you can pretend to have experience in winning wars? Are you a hero, lying about being tortured without any witnesses around, while other prisoners of war say that torture was very unlikely at that place and that time? The most harsh interrogators were frightening you by saying that you would never go home if you don’t serve the Hanoi propaganda, else you could go home with priority over others. So, McCain is also offered that priority, but he refused to go because it was against the military code of conduct. If he should dare to go, he should have been bringing himself into contempt. But is that specific heroic behavior? And by the way, McCain never became any executive power, so, what is his real experience? Losing, especially losing his dignity, i. g. calling his wife a “cunt” in front of the press, and recently like a pimp, offering his wife to compete in a topless beauty contest at a bikers festival.
Yes he is a notorious liar, saying the Obama will raise taxis for lower and middle class incomes, while Obama clearly announced lowering all taxes for incomes below the 220 thousand dollars, paid by ending the war in Iraq and McCain lowers only taxes over 220 thousand dollars, raising the spending on wars and steeling a trillion from the social security fund, endangering the pension of older people, where they had paid for during the whole of their active life. That kind of hero is John McCain and that he is a dishonorable coward, a thief and a liar. That true story has to be told.