Calm before the storm

A funny thing happened as July turned to August. In July, you will recall, Barack Obama travelled through Europe and the Middle East to widespread acclaim.

By the end of the trip, John McCain was so desperate to attract attention that he resorted to holding a news conference at a German restaurant on the day Obama spoke to 200,000 people in Germany.

As August began, however, McCain went on the offensive. He accused Obama of being a prisoner of his party's left wing on energy policy then changed tack to charge the Democrat with pandering to voters.

He ran a TV ad comparing Obama to Brittney Spears and Paris Hilton, arguably the two most famously vapid celebrities on the planet. When the ad was called everything from racist to merely undignified, McCain brushed aside any and all criticism.

By the end of the week, pundits across the political spectrum were pronouncing this offensive a huge success. McCain, they all agreed, had landed some serious blows on his Democratic opponent. Outside the Washington echo chamber, however, the reaction was very different.

Though no one in Washington likes to admit this, it often seems as though America's late night comics have their fingers closer to the country's pulse than the journalists and pundits who dominate TV's political talk shows.

And the late night comics were nearly unanimous in the view that McCain's assault on Obama came over as cranky and sophomoric.

Even allowing for the fact that professional joke-tellers over in the US seem to skew heavily towards the Democrats, this was telling. Where Washington saw Obama stumbling, the comics looked at the same events and saw McCain desperately flailing.

The coming weeks are likely to give all of us a better idea of which camp - the pundits or the comedians - is closer to being right about the presidential race.

Regular readers of this space will know that I have spent the last year saying polls do not mean much in an American election until fairly late in the day. Traditionally the 'real' presidential campaign starts in early September, and it is hard to give much credence to any sample taken before the middle of that month.

Not doing well

It has often been noted that Obama is not doing as well in most opinion polls as he ought to. Surveys give him a lead of about 4 points over McCain.

But at a moment when Republicans control the White House under an incumbent whose approval ratings are touching historic lows, when around 80 per cent of Americans say the country is on the "wrong track", and when what pollsters call a "generic Democrat" (i.e. a question phrased without candidate names, such as "if the election were held today would you vote for a Democrat or a Republican") beats a "generic Republican" by 10 to 12 points, he ought to be doing better.

This worries Democrats because many fear Obama's current lead won't be enough due to what is known as the "Bradley Effect".

This term refers to the tendency of black candidates running against whites to do better in polls than they actually do on election day, presumably because white voters lie to pollsters for fear of appearing to be racist. (The phenomenon is named for the late Tom Bradley who narrowly lost the California governorship in 1982 despite having led virtually every pre-election poll by a seemingly comfortable margin)

It is important to remember, however, that most Americans are not yet paying close, day-to-day, attention to the presidential race and are not likely to begin doing so until after the party conventions, scheduled for the end of this month and early September.

Think of the last few months as rehearsal. The political class gets deeply absorbed in the minutiae of the battle, but the campaigns themselves are more apt to think of this as a time to test and refine their messages in preparation for the real struggle that still lies ahead.

Which brings us back to the Obama-as-celebrity ad. Though McCain steadfastly defended it, his campaign quietly dropped the ad last week replacing it with a version that no longer includes pictures of Brittney and Paris.

Does this indicate the campaign was pleased with the media buzz the original version garnered, but now wants to move on? Or might it be a quiet acknowledgement that the ad, in its original form, was undignified and, perhaps, counterproductive?

From outside the campaign it is impossible to say - but watch what happens next and you might get a hint at the answer.

Gordon Robison is a journalist and consultant based in Burlington, Vermont. He has lived in and reported on the Middle East for two decades, including assignments in Baghdad for both CNN and Fox News.