The Note: McCain's Mojo

August 6, 2008 -- So it's Paris Hilton making political statements while Cindy McCain gets nominated for a topless contest-- why would we lose the capacity for surprise in this race?

(And Sen. Barack Obama goes "American Idol" with the men who could be his veepstakes finalists on Wednesday -- he appears with one, his wife with the other -- though the fair-haired guy took the suspense out of the day.)

Perhaps a more shocking development: Even before Sen. John McCain took Ronald Reagan's famous line and turned it on its partisan head, it was clear that McCain's campaign was better off than it was two weeks ago.

It's the payoff from the new McCain strategy: bug, annoy, pester -- and attack with one voice, and as close to only one voice as possible. True, the campaign is more about Obama as a result -- but it's McCain who's found a new storyline for his candidacy.

He adds to it in his latest ad -- swiping a line that Obama would have been happy to use all by himself: " 'We're worse off than we were four years ago' is a line that will remind voters of what Ronald Reagan said of then-president Carter's administration in 1980," Mark Memmott writes in USA Today. "The key difference between then and now is that Reagan, a Republican, was criticizing Democrat Carter. In Broken, Republican McCain is distancing himself from the tenure of a fellow Republican -- President Bush."

"Mr. McCain has criticized the Bush administration over its handling of the Iraq war, its lackluster efforts to combat climate change, and the absence of a comprehensive energy strategy," Russell Berman writes in the New York Sun. "But in the ad Mr. McCain casts a far wider net and, in effect, condemns Mr. Bush's second term as a failure."

Yes, this puts him in an awkward political box: His official position, as ABC's Jake Tapper points out, is that we're better off than we were eight years ago, yet worse off than we were four years ago.

Obama's response ad is the second in a row to feature that celebrity known as President Bush: "The original maverick? Or just more of the same."

But McCain has set the agenda for basically a week now -- and he's making a turn that gets him back to his brand.

"Democrats are increasingly worried Barack Obama is not hitting back hard enough against rival John McCain and missing opportunities to tie the Republican candidate to the Bush administration," Sam Youngman reports in The Hill. "McCain seemed to find his voice with the launch of two campaign ads, which received mixed reviews but helped him break through the media clutter and target the Illinois senator on the issue of offshore drilling."

Said Gov. Ed Rendell, D-Pa. (shouting some of the first whispers, and probably not on the short list with comments like this): "Even I called some Obama people and said, 'Hey, let's get on the air and hammer this guy [McCain] for being the biggest hypocrite there is. . . . We let them nail us on that stuff, and we haven't come back as aggressively as we should."

This is Obama finding a (lofty) voice: "For the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, we must end the age of oil in our time," Obama said in Youngstown, Ohio, per ABC's Jake Tapper and Sunlen Miller.

Of the tire-gauge offensive: "It's like these guys take pride in being ignorant, you know? They think it's funny that they're making fun of something that is actually true."

Those clever RNC press folks managed to get tire gauges delivered to the Obama traveling press corpse in Elkhart, Ind., Tuesday night.

(But was this McCain agreeing -- or at least taking some zing from his attacks? At his tele-town hall meeting Tuesday, McCain said: "And could I mention that Senator Obama a couple of days ago said that we ought to all inflate our tires, and I don't disagree with that. The American Automobile Association strongly recommends it, but I also don't think that that's a way to become energy independent.")

Still, this team knows how to press: "John McCain is going nuclear on gas prices," Politico's Lisa Lerer reports. "At least that's what his campaign would like voters to believe, as the presumptive Republican nominee crosses the country touting his energy policies in hopes of winning voters anxious about record fuel prices."

The Los Angeles Times' Peter Nicholas: "Often cool on the stump, Obama struck a combative note when he told the 2,700 people who came to see him here that McCain had unfairly characterized his position. Ridiculing him over tire gauges, Obama said, is shallow campaigning -- on the order of McCain's much-publicized TV ad likening Obama to celebrities Britney Spears and Paris Hilton."

If you don't think Obama feels the pressure, check out his interview with the Las Vegas Sun's Jon Ralston: "I thought I was talking to you instead of debating John McCain, but I am happy to let you serve as his proxy. The fact of the matter is that I supported that energy bill saying at the time that those tax breaks were wrong but also recognizing that this was the largest investment in alternative energy in history," Obama said.

For fans of the Truth-O-Meter, meet Politifact's Flip-O-Meter, where Obama earns a "full flop" for shifting on whether to tap the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.

By forcing Obama's hand on drilling, McCain may be giving him troubles on the left. "If he does really get behind this new compromise in Congress, I think that would be a huge mistake," Mark Ferrulo, executive director of Progress Florida, tells McClatchy's Lesley Clark and Beth Reinhard. Margie Alt of Environment America said in a statement: "We are disappointed to see that Sen. Obama has expressed openness to compromise on offshore drilling and the health of our beaches."

McCain's even one-upping Obama with his Olympic ad buy: He's spending $6 million, compared with Obama's $5 million, per Advertising Age's Ira Teinowitz (in part because McCain has no need to save money in his kitty for after the convention).

How is everything shaking out? A six-point Obama lead (hello, stability) in the AP-Ipsos poll. "McCain, the senator from Arizona, is leading by 10 points among whites and is even with Obama among men, groups with whom Republicans traditionally do well in national elections," per the AP's Alan Fram. "Obama leads by 13 points among women, by 30 points among voters up to age 34, and by 55 points among blacks, Hispanics and other minorities, the poll shows."

"In the two months since Barack Obama captured the Democratic nomination, he has hit a ceiling in public opinion, proving unable to make significant gains with any segment of the national electorate," Politico's David Paul Kuhn reports.

"His bubble hasn't burst, but it's leaking a little bit," Peter Brown, assistant director of the Quinnipiac University Polling Institute, tells the Washington Times' S.A. Miller and Stephen Dinan. "It is not massive. It is incremental, but we've seen it across the board in all of these states, that [Mr. McCain] is doing better among white voters, especially white voters without college educations."

"Whatever one might think of the [celebrity] ad' s execution, as far as the McCain campaign was concerned, it was placed at exactly the right time for exactly the . . . right purpose: To plant seeds of doubt in the summer that will grow into a full-scale assault -- turning a candidate's greatest strength into his weakness -- by the first leaves of fall," Sridhar Pappu writes for the Washington Independent.

It looks like any other campaign (who wins when that happens?): "This year's presidential campaign is shaping up as a case study in how the race for the White House has turned into a form of marketing warfare, featuring advertisements and gimmicks seeking to brand the opposing candidate with a series of indelible negative images," The Boston Globe's Michael Kranish writes.