To Kill a Fly

Its a metaphor right?

I'm feeling a bit burnt out on politics this morning, and so have instead fixated on this article. Turns out it's very hard to kill a fly. "At the mere hint of a threat, the insects adjust their preflight stance to flee in the opposite direction, ensuring a clean getaway." All this happens within 200 milliseconds, which is rather less time than it takes a lumbering humor to bring down a flyswatter. How do we know all this? "Dickinson's team studied this process in fruit flies using high-speed digital imaging equipment and a fancy fly swatter." Gotta love it: Hundreds of thousands of dollars probably went into developing a better strategy for murdering harmless bugs. But in case youre interested, Dickinson's recommendation is simple: Aim for the escape route.

Actually i think it makes good political strategy. Apply this to John McCain's campaign. Every one was ready for him to pick Romney or Pawlenty but seeing the danger in picking either of these two McCain made a rapid and abrupt change in flight. It summarizes McCain's presidential run, every time there is a policy he does not like to discuss or something else to dodge he goes POW. POW is the McCain escape route.

Obama, and the rest of the world, caught on to this so they started to close down this route. It became the "Noun Verb POW" attack on McCain trying to force the well dry. In large part it has succeeded. So the McCain campaign has set about developing a new escape route, the Bristol Palin Pregnency, and Sexism against Sarah Palin.

As you've heard already, McCain senior adviser Steve Schmidt wailed and beat his breast about the coverage of Palin in an interview in this morning's Washington Post.

Schmidt, one of the most hard-boiled operatives out there, a man who lived through the Clinton impeachment circus, a fellow who worked for Bush in 2004 and encouraged the media's savaging of John Kerry, actually accused the press of being "on a mission to destroy" Palin, adding that his campaign feels "under siege."

Now when the media asks questions that McCain does not like or wants justification about a point regarding Sarah Palin we are going to hear the cry of sexism or bias from the right. It is back to a time honored GOP escape route, "left wing" media. The question is whether the media stands against this sort of thing and continues to do their jobs. History is not encouraging. So what is the Obama campaign to do?

Well they have to aim for the escape route and find a way to shut down the media bias and sexism defense. The ultimate goal of the Obama campaign is to get this on to policy because the GOP has nothing there. They want to escape policy at all costs as Steve Schmidt has admitted. Getting Hillary Clinton and other prominent Dem women out there to back up the media and reinforce the line that, "its not sexist to ask about policy and record".

Other than that there is always the hope that Obam can ambush McCain. Predict his topic switch so that when he tries to make it the campaign has the fly swatter ready.