Obama's Strategy for Campaigning Against McCain-Palin, the POW and the Mom

Obama must penetrate motherhood-and-military armor the Republicans have devised

By Liz Halloran
Posted September 12, 2008

"Kids for the Hero and the Mom"

That hand-lettered sign, held aloft by a little boy at a rally this week in Virginia for GOP nominee John McCain and his running mate, Sarah Palin, neatly summed up the dilemma Barack Obama faces going into the final stretch of the presidential campaign.

With the emergence of Palin as a national celebrity with powerful appeal to the previously uninspired Christian right and a healthy cohort of white women, nervous supporters have been urging the Democratic nominee to get tougher, sharper, meaner. But how does Obama, the proponent of post-partisan politics, do that against a Republican ticket that has spent the past two weeks wrapping and rewrapping itself in powerful, myth-making narratives of working motherhood and military service?

Republican strategists, many of whom came to the McCain effort from the Bush-Cheney political stable, have turned Palin's gender into her armor. Similarly, they've increasingly used McCain's harrowing 5½ years in a Vietnamese prison camp four decades ago to inoculate him from criticism ranging from his episodes of confusion about warring factions in Iraq to his uncertainty about how many homes he and his wife, Cindy, own. (When questioned later about his lack of knowledge about their collection of homes, McCain deflected with his POW experience: "I spent some years without a kitchen table, without a chair, and I know what it's like to be blessed by the opportunities of this great nation.") Continue On