Sunday, September 21, 2008

You must chill! Here's why:

One of my favorite new blogs is by a guy named Nate Silver. Who is he? Beats me. But he started writing for the New Republic, and has a great blog of his own called Fivethirtyeight.com, which examines polls and electoral trends and baseball statistics. And his latest item gives a really smart window into the way the Obama campaign is probably spending their time and resources.

I've written a lot recently about all of my Democratic friends who have, for the last few weeks, been freaking out about Obama's campaign. "Oy, he's not hitting back hard enough." "Oy, he's not ahead by as much as he should be." "Oy, he should have picked Hillary." On Thursday, a good friend of mine bet me $50 that John McCain would win the election. Yesterday, Daily Kos posted an item about how supporters couldn't get Obama yard signs in Virginia... which, of course, spells doom for Obama's chances.

Everybody needs to chill.

While it's true, I think the Obama campaign had been caught off guard by the both brilliant and moronic Sarah Palin pick, they had firm plans in place on how they were going to win this campaign.

Silver goes through one of the more interesting tactics that they've obviously been employing: Instead of wasting time drumming up the base support (which, by the way, already supports Obama and which is not going to be dampened by the absence of lawn signs) the Obama team has been working in swing states to, uh, register voters. Kind of a big deal. And way more important, in the end, then holding big rallies that get a cycle or two of news coverage.