09:45 am
Has Steve Schmidt Run out of Ideas? (#2 of 2)
Is McCain’s attack messaging machine grinding to a halt? Steve Schmidt, McCain’s new guru, has been on a roll lately, but those days may be coming to an end. Earlier today, we looked at the events of the past few days and how the McCain campaign has responded.
Now let’s examine how these responses fit into Schmidt’s broader strategy.
Over the past few weeks, the mainstream media have embraced Schmidt as the newest political genius, crediting him with bringing new message discipline to the campaign and boosting McCain in the polls. Perhaps the best example is a glowing profile by Lois Romano that ran in Thursday’s Washington Post-dated. Romano even scored a quote from Schmidt’s political mentor, Karl Rove:
“Since the changes, things are happening,” observes Karl Rove, architect of George W. Bush’s presidential races. “A guy who’d been in and out of the campaign for months told me he quickly saw a new crispness and order to the operation. He knew it when he walked in one day and there was a large calendar with daily message points plotted for several weeks — a sign of strategic thinking that hadn’t been so evident before.
Like Rove, Schmidt knows how to attack an opponent’s strength and turn it into a weakness. His “celebrity” attacks clearly had a bigger impact on the race than Democrats expected — not swiftboat-caliber damage, but significant nonetheless.
The ads hammer home two key messages: that Obama is more concerned with celebrity than leadership, and that he is not ready to lead. Schmidt also has McCain reinforce these themes in campaign appearances — most infamously when he said that Obama would be willing to lose the war to win the election.
It’s an effective strategy, helping to narrow significantly the gap between the two candidates. But it’s not yet clear whether it will have any lasting impact on the race. The celebrity meme clearly is not as effective as similar attacks in the past, and there’s already evidence that people are tuning out. To put it another way, associating Obama with Britney is proving to have a far shorter shelf life than swiftboating or flip-flops.
Despite that — and despite the fact that the ads have also driven up McCain’s own negatives — Schmidt clearly thinks they’re working: over the past three weeks, the campaign has put out three four five variations on the celebrity theme: “Celeb” “The One,” “Painful,” “Fan Club,” and just the other day, the (unintentionally) hilariously named “The One II.”
You could interpret this as message discipline, but there’s also another, equally plausible way to look at it: Steve Schmidt has run out of ideas.
The entire McCain messaging operation is now built around the celebrity ads. Yes, there are other commercials, but they use older themes that the campaign adopted long before Schmidt took control: the more positive,biographical clips and the “look who has criticized Obama and/or praised McCain” ads. Neither has proven effective.
So Schmidt may be capable, but it looks like he’s also a one-trick pony. “Celebrity” is the only message that has worked. So the campaign has started using it over and over and over again, to a point where no one is paying attention anymore. And as any advertising expert can tell you, the only thing worse than an underperforming brand is an overexposed one.
The reality is that message discipline does not necessarily translate into adaptability or agility. Schmidt may be focused, but he has not yet demonstrated the capacity to develop smart, effective ads that respond effectively to breaking events. Yes, he and his team produced three ads in roughly 36 hours, but none of them have resonated. And perhaps more importantly, none have managed to reverse the shift in momentum brought on by Estategate and Biden.
Schmidt still has time, and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Obama may give him the ammunition he needs to put his candidate in the White House. But if this is all he has — if there really is no second act, then McCain may discover that Schmidt’s greatest strength — message discipline — may also be a weakness that the Obama campaign will be able to exploit to its considerable advantage.