Where's The Truth Squad And Tier Two Effort?

by Steve Soto

Multiple polls are out there this morning showing how bamboozled the American electorate can be when the GOP sets about selling them another bill of goods. The latest ABC News/Washington Post poll shows that McCain is leading among likely voters by two points, making the earlier Gallup poll an outlier. But that poll finds white women have swung away from Obama/Biden to McCain/Palin, obviously without knowing a thing about her actual record and beliefs, simply based on the image Steve Schmidt and Karl Rove have created of her, and packaged speeches she’s been fed. Similar CBS News and CNN polls yesterday also reported a close race, with all the energy on the GOP side, again a result of superior packaging and of setting a negative image of Obama for weeks prior to the GOP convention. And despite claims to the contrary from ABC, Democrats should not expect the three broadcast networks to seriously press Palin in the weeks ahead.

I said earlier that polls are more relevant later in September, and I still hold to that. But there are basic campaign questions that have arisen, such as the possible drop-off in Obama fundraising for August, and the damage that Obama caused himself by not picking Hillary. I said several months ago that Obama’s campaign may start resembling a balloon losing its air once they vanquished Hillary, calling into question whether his appeal really rested upon some gauzy notion of change and a new kind of politics detached from a passionate core of issues, or was simply an extremely well-run Anyone-But-Hillary effort that appealed to people early and then built its own momentum. If the fundraising has now tapered off, and if white women have less interest in voting for Obama/Biden now that he has finally sent her packing, then the GOP’s cynical move to elevate someone who has very little common ground with Hillary will make it harder for Obama to regain that energy.

It would be easier if Obama had a Tier Two effort to deal with Palin, to subject her to a “Truth Squad” counter-punch every day, while he focused on the deceit behind the McCain message, but Obama neutered the 527’s back in May and avoided answering Keith Olbermann’s question on the subject yesterday when given the chance to account for his decision. Olbermann couldn’t even get Obama to say that the McCain/Palin campaign is spinning lies about her record, even when the media has already established this fact. Not a good sign, since I’ve seen little evidence from Team Obama of any organized Truth Squad effort to follow McCain and Palin around and fact check their lies in the same media cycle. A Tier Two and Truth Squad effort are basic tools that should have been put in place months ago, and yet this campaign wanted all the money and message itself. Unlike the primary season, when the Obama folks and MSNBC itself had no problem telling us that Hillary’s campaign was lying, Team Obama seems unable for unwilling to have someone establish a narrative that McCain and Palin are lying now, which is a predicate to getting those women voters to return to Obama by Election Day.

Obama needs to keep doing what he’s doing now, focusing on his message and the hollowness of McCain’s claim of being a change agent who sat on his hands and rubber-stamped Bush’s agenda these last eight years. He needs for surrogates in a Tier Two operation and a Truth Squad effort to pin down Palin and deflate the spin every day from the GOP campaign. And he needs these things now.