Pre-Race Attacks

In case y'all hadn't noticed yet, I've been really busy for about a month and haven't been able to post as frequently (once a day) as I'd like. And that's not going to change at least for about a week or so. But I'm trying to still keep up, so I'll just post here a comment I left at Carpetbagger's in reference to his post on Obama ramping up his attacks on McCain and how he's "just getting warmed up."

I definitely agree that Obama is just warming up. As I keep saying, for most voters the presidential race doesn’t start until after August. Everything before that is just pre-race positioning. It’s not good to fall behind before the race begins, but it’s a mistake to give it everything you’ve got before you even get started.

Especially as political attacks generally have a very short shelf life. Once you hit your opponent with something, you generally have a week at most to keep using it before you have to come up with something else. And if you throw everything at once, your attacks won’t mean as much and you’ll run out of them early.

That's exactly what the McCain campaign is doing and it's going to hurt him in the long run. Once a political attack wears off, your opponent becomes innoculated against it. So McCain's throwing everything he's got and he's still losing in the polls. Things are just going to get worse for him once voters start paying attention and he's still trying to repeat the same old attacks. It'll all be old news and he'll have little credibility.