With Election Day now less than a week away, just where do things stand on the most important election in our lifetimes?

In short, I think “good” is the right answer.  Of course anytime you make that sort of statement, you’re almost always looking around for some wood to knock on, but given that, let’s take a look at where things stand and then make some predictions for posterity.

Obama’s strategy has been neutralized:

Like any other type of campaign, political campaigns begin with a strategy which answers the question “how are you going to win”.  In Obama’s case, given that he couldn’t campaign on a record of success, the answer was to convince the country that Romney was the boogeyman.  Obama’s campaign spent over a quarter of a billion dollars this summer throwing everything but the kitchen-sink at Romney in an attempt to convince voters of what a bad guy he was. 

The potential problem with any strategy is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum.  There are opponents, and if they do their job they will try to undermine your strategy.  It only took Romney ninety minutes in front of seventy million people to render Obama’s strategy worthless, (meaning the biggest beneficiaries of Obama’s strategy were TV station owners).  read more »