I think Schmidt can pull it off. He got arnold reelected in an extremely liberal state.
The trick is message discipline, which they will need to craft soon and drill day by day.
He had a winning message by undermining Obama’s popularity with the vacuousness of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton’s, partially undermined by Palin. Yes, I know we all love her, but her polling numbers are way down and she’s no longer helping boost McCain’s numbers with women even though she energizes the base. It seemed worth it to get the female vote as a trade for undermining that message. Now they have neither the vote or the original message and have to start from square one.
They need to create an economic narrative and stick to it. And Obama has made plenty ... plenty of mistakes.
The main narrative should be Obama’s understanding of the economy is non-existant (heck his poll bounce is due to the generic democratic advantage, not anything he’s proposed or said) and McCain has a plan.
Obama managed 160 million dollars to distribute to Chicago schools (with Ayers). He used it to push a socialist agenda and ended up with no improvement. He stood silent when we could’ve stopped Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and now the taxpayer is footing the bill. He promised to lower taxes when he ran for senate election but instead only voted to raise them.
The list goes on and on.
The trick this time though is that McCain also needs a plan on the economy that will solve this mess and stick to it as well.
So basically, “Obama can’t even handle 160 million dollars, how can he handle a 2 trillion dollar federal budget? Is he ready to lead? No.”
Hammer it in.
Not that great a feat considering arnold is extremely liberal.
Part of the problem with Palin was she was attacked to a degree we have never seen. Hollywood to the news media were merciless on her. Of course, it didn’t help that the campaign tried to hide her from the media onslaught. Palin should have held more press conferences and townhalls adressing those criticisms. The media’s treatment of Palin should serve as a warning for conservatives in the future. If a credible conservative poses a threat to liberals, the media will go nuclear on him or her. If conservativism is to survive and prosper in the future, we need to figure out a way to counter media bias.