Pat Dollard

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The Swamp:

Sen. John McCain spent a lot of time this week making light of the media’s focus on his presidential opponent, Democrat Barack Obama – even issuing “junior varsity” press passes to the reporters covering the Arizona Republican while Obama trekked across the Middle East and Europe with network anchors in tow and releasing a Web video mocking the media’s Obama affection.

But maybe keeping the spotlight on Obama is a great strategy for McCain.

Consider: Polls show Americans are overwhelmingly upset with the Bush administration and the direction of the country. Both are recipes for a blowout for the incumbent party. But a batch of polls this week show McCain nipping at Obama’s heels, both nationally and in swing states.

Why, you ask? One distinct possibility is that a lot of voters don’t see this election as a referendum on Bush or the direction of the nation, but on Obama. And it’s clear from polling that they’re still not sold on the junior senator from Illinois. More than half the respondents in a recent poll by The Economist magazine, for example, described Obama as “inexperienced” – just the sort of doubt that McCain’s campaign is cultivating.

By that logic, the longer McCain can keep voters focused on Obama – and keep cultivating those doubts – the better his chances to win in November. To the extent McCain wants attention, it’s to his arguments that he’s a good alternative for Obama-wary voters. It may be his best path to victory; it certainly appears to be the one he’s on now.

Consider McCain’s campaign press releases this week, while Obama was overseas. Close to 20 of them rapped Obama directly. McCain’s weekly radio address begins with three paragraphs of direct Obama criticism:

“Good morning. I’m John McCain, and this week the presidential contest was a long-distance affair, with my opponent touring various continents and arriving yesterday in Paris. With all the breathless coverage from abroad, and with Senator Obama now addressing his speeches to ‘the people of the world,’ I’m starting to feel a little left out. Maybe you are too.

“Back here in the country that we are competing to lead, a lot folks were having trouble trying to square Senator Obama’s multiple positions on the surge in Iraq. First, he opposed the surge and confidently predicted that it would fail. Then he tried to prevent funding for the troops who carried out the surge. But now that it’s clear that the surge has succeeded, and brought victory in Iraq within sight, Senator Obama can’t quite bring himself to admit his own failure in judgment. Instead, he commits the even greater error of insisting that even in hindsight, he would still oppose the surge. Even in retrospect, he would choose the path of retreat and failure for America over the path of success and victory. That’s not exactly my idea of the judgment we seek in a commander-in-chief.

“Oddly enough, my opponent advocates the deployment of two new combat brigades to Afghanistan — in other words, a surge. We’re left to wonder how he can deny that the surge in Iraq has succeeded, while at the same time announcing that a surge is just what we need in Afghanistan. I’ll leave all these questions for my opponent and his team of 300 foreign policy advisors to work out for themselves. With luck, they’ll get their story straight by the time the Obama campaign returns to North America.”

Obama is back to the domestic campaign trail this week. It’ll be interesting to see how “left out” McCain keeps feeling now – and how much he wants to be.