Rope-A-Dope?

Sorry, this could have been folded into the last post: Read Matthew Yglesias on the Palin selection, and more generally on a difference in approach between the Obama campaign operation and the McCain campaign.

Obama's spokespeople have their own way of doing things, and their own timetable. It's enough to make working journalists annoyed, and even more casual observers like me nervous. Bill Clinton in '92 was really good at responding to GOP mudslinging within a day. That, I would have said, was the role model that the Obama '08 campaign needed to follow. Instead, Obama's people don't bother to return mud for mud immediately. They are more proactive and deliberate. You could view Obama's speech Thursday night as tying up a few loose ends at once, and hopefully in a more coherent and impactful way. It's unorthodox, maybe brilliant, but a little nerve-wracking. My boy Tomasky worried on his blog a few days ago that in his judgment McCain had won about 25 of the last 30 news cycles. David Axelrod would respond with a shrug.

All will be revealed in the big campaign postmortem articles run in Time and Newsweek the second week of November. Until then, fingers and toes crossed.