Obama's Celebrity is a Good Target

John McCain's television ad comparing Barack Obama to Paris Hilton and Britney Spears will be chronicled by no sane historian, and even those of us who have seen it must curse the expense of time and neurons involved in viewing it or reading about it or, God forbid, writing about it. (There goes my memory of the subjunctive of "être", for example, dislodged to make room for McCain's latest.) But those of us determined to follow this race without fail - at work, at home, in our beds, in our showers - can say we saw something this week, and that was the coalescing of McCain's anti-Obama message.

The GOP has auditioned many negative adjectives for Obama: effete, liberal, radical, Weathermen-loving, flip-floppy. But few have stuck. With the introduction of "hubris" and its variants, however, the GOP seems finally to have broken through. When The Late Show with David Letterman unveiled the "Top 10 signs Barack Obama is overconfident" - among which "Proposed bill to change Oklahoma to 'Oklobama'" was one - it was an official blessing of the message. That the progressive blogosphere is widely disgusted makes it that much sweeter for conservatives.

This leaves the two campaigns in a curious place. Obama has a useful positive message about himself (idealist changer), but lacks a persuasive negative one about McCain ("Bush's third term" doesn't seem to be sticking). McCain now has a useful negative message about Obama (vacuous megalomaniac), but lacks a positive one about himself (jihad-crusher doesn't seem to inspire). So a lot hinges on who has the most valuable half and who remedies his message deficit first.

Certainly, even if Obama doesn't come up with a new anti-McCain message, he still has cause for optimism. Nailing down the positive half of your sales pitch is a good thing. That's a lot better than the circumstances of 2004, when George Bush had both a sturdy positive message (I'm a plain and resolute fighter) and a punishing negative message (John Kerry's an effete flip-flopper), while John Kerry lacked either. Considering that Kerry still ran a close race, this bodes well for Obama.

It helps that we're even sicker of the current White House. And - who knows? - perhaps the third-term-of-Bush line will finally start to draw some blood. But I suspect Obama will have to come up with something stronger. If it's true that close races hinge on character, then taunts like "another Bush term" don't have much power to wound, since they're really about policy, not personality.

As for McCain, even if he doesn't come up with a new pro-McCain message, he still has plenty to be happy about. People say this election is mainly a referendum on Obama, so defining Obama is of higher priority. With men like Steve Schmidt and outside advisers like Karl Rove, McCain is blessed with a highly sleazy and effective team that seems to have gotten the job done in the past week or two. They understand is that a political caricature can be wildly exaggerated, but an effective one requires a foundation of truth. To depict Obama's occasional cockiness as insane self-love is a perfect marriage of exaggeration and character attack.

As for settling on a sunnier pitch for McCain, the team is still working on it but is helped by having a candidate the public already likes. The press still likes McCain, too, even as he has aimed his blows lower and lower.

McCain has one more thing to celebrate: If his negative message against Obama sticks, then it follows Karl Rove's unwritten rule of attacking an opponent's greatest strength. It recasts Obama's hopeful audacity as empty vainglory. That's pretty effective stuff.

So Obama might be wise to play by the same rules. McCain's great strength, according to polls, is his foreign policy experience. Fortunately for Obama (if less fortunately for the rest of us), the truth is that McCain's foreign policy is a bit like McCain the man - characterised by a willingness, all things being equal, to choose a fight. That is to say, it's a bit terrifying. So going after McCain's global belligerence could fulfil two imperatives at once: it could attack McCain on his perceived strength, and it could remind us of the benefit of a breather before we launch a third war with, say, Iran.

Buck Turgidson is one of the most inspired characters in Dr. Strangelove - "Mr President, I'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than 10 to 20 million killed, tops" - but he's best kept out of the White House. I suspect Obama might gain some ground by echoing this point. But even if it backfires, we'll at least have been warned.