Saddleback

Like any serious political junkie, I watched the entire Saddleback forum on Saturday night.  My assessment, in a nutshell:  Obama sounded like Dukakis; McCain sounded like Reagan.  If I were a McCainiac, I’d be giddy with excitement.

There has been a rope-a-dope meme bouncing around the internet over the last few weeks.  Democratic-leaning pundits have guessed that the Obama campaign’s weak performance over the last few weeks might have been an attempt to get McCain to shoot his negative-ad wad early.  Then the Obama campaign would come out strong after the convention.

I think that Obama’s awful performance on Saturday casts serious doubt on that theory. Obama was obviously unprepared or prepared badly.  More likely the latter.  He gave long, professorial responses (just like Dukakis) where he should have and could have delivered short, coherent, on-message response.

This makes me think that the weakness we’ve seen in the last few weeks as Obama has dropped like a rock in the polls is no rope-a-dope maneuver but actually the result of a lousy campaign.