Look, this is the kind of thing that we need to hammer at over and over again until we're blue in the face. Let the surrogates tackle McCain's abandoned integrity and Palin's escalatinfumbles; Obama needs to be driving home constantly that his tax plan is significantly more beneficial to the majority of Americans than McCain's. The second graph in Hilzoy's post is a devastating reminder of the inability of the Obama campaign to get this argument out there, and of the persistent power of the "tax-and-spend Democrat vs. responsible Republican" paradigm, which, while obviously baseless, either is very tough to combat or hasn't been combated enough (I say it's the latter).
So how can Obama get his point across? The information in the Tax Policy Center graph is very powerful, and reflects extremely well on Obama to anyone who isn't a supply-sider, but clearly using any graph is out of the question for a 30-second TV spot. The ad needs to strike a balance between specific and broad, clinical and personal. I don't have any brilliant ideas about how to do this, but surely Obama can use his record-breaking August cash influx to put the best and the brightest of ad guys and gals on this. Contained in that one graph is the perfect juxtaposition of Obama's economic populism with McCain's trickle-down, backwards approach. The campaign needs to set about turning it into votes.
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