The four stories of a (winning) campaign

ILLUSTRATED: A campaign communications director must constantly monitor four story lines; what each candidate says about themselves, and each other.

Drew Westen has written yet another great article. I have referenced his analysis of the body politic many times on this blog, such as here.

The two key paragraphs are:

as a candidate, you have to focus first and foremost not on a litany of "issues" but on four stories: the story you tell about yourself, the story your opponent is telling about himself, the story your opponent is telling about you, and the story you are telling about your opponent. Candidates who offer compelling stories in all four quadrants of this "message grid" win, and those who leave any of them to chance generally lose.

And this...

When I work with candidates, one of the first things I do is to spend a day with them walking through their life history and listening for the salient events, the values that mean something to them, and the stories from their lives or from the people they have met in their lifetimes or on the campaign trail that make those values vivid and come alive and illustrate where their heart is, so that when they go on the road, they have a coherent story to tell about who they are, what they stand for, and how their life story connects with the lives and concerns of their constituents.

Campaign '08 as sport

ILLUSTRATED: Be optimistic about Obama

A couple months ago, I wrote some verbal ammo for the horse race between Obama and McCain. Let me reiterate that last point I made that this is not a fair fight.
Political talk shows are like sports pre-game shows: they talk about the big personalities and strategy. They do that because they get the highest ratings.
A football analogy is just how a football game that is within a field goal going into the last quarter, that game will be decided on the line of scrimmage. In politics, if a race is within the margin of error going into the last week, that race will be decided in volunteer field offices. It's relatively boring to talk about, so the media doesn't focus on it.
As for looking at this race in the last 13 weeks, soccer is a better analogy. Soccer is wide open and improvised, just like resource allocation among swing states. McCain will have $84 Million. Obama might have twice that. So McCain is like a soccer team with 11 players. Obama might have 25. So Obama can play man-to-man defense, AND zone defense, AND his forwards can swamp McCain's defense. Forcing McCain to spend resources anywhere is a tactical victory, since it thins him out.
That said, get out there and canvass.