evilOpinion: McCain's Attack Strategy - Does Anyone Care?

Indulge me in sports analogy, since it's a Monday morning.

In football, when your team is facing a tough opponent, you watch game film of other teams facing them to see what they did that worked. Then you take those successes and try to incorporate them into your own game plan.

Based on the McCain/Palin campaign's latest strategy, you have to wonder if the only "game film" they've been watching is from the 2004 Bush/Kerry election.

Despite Hillary ClintonHillary Clinton's negative attacks largely backfiring on her in the primaries, the McCain campaign is continuing to ignore policy and focus their attacks on personality and judgment.

This tactic is especially befuddling considering the last presidential debate brought Obama's "trustworthy" numbers up past McCain in most polls.

As John Geer, author of In Defence of Negativity: Attack Ads in Presidential Campaigns said Sunday "McCain is running in a very toxic environment for Republicans and going on the attack is a sign that they're in trouble,"

"Americans aren't stupid. To come back to it now, after Obama has been looking very presidential, and to do so when the polls show you down seven points and you're pulling out of Michigan - it's a tactic that will seem suspicious to most Americans."

So it comes back to the question that has been asked since "Karl RoveKarl Rove-style politics" became successful in 2000 - Has the American public finally had enough?

Do voters want to hear about how the candidates plan on fixing the economical problems or do they want to hear about Obama having a campaign party with Bill Ayers, a name most voters under 35 had never heard of before this election.

Do voters want to hear the nuances of the candidate's health care plans, or would they rather listen to more ads saying Barack ObamaBarack Obama will raise everyone's taxes?

It's like a football team so focused on their own passing game that they can't adapt to try running the ball even when facing the best pass defense. The McCain campaign seems determined to play right into Barack Obama's latest criticisms:

“They’d rather try to tear our campaign down than lift this country up,” Obama told a crowd in North Carolina. “That’s what you do when you’re out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time. So I want all of you to be clear, I’m going to keep on talking about the issues that matter.”

So was the negative explosion just a weekend trial? A jab thrown to see if it hit? Not according to the McCain campaign. "We're going to get a little tougher," an unnamed Republican strategist told the Washington Post this past weekend. "We've got to question this guy's associations. Very soon. There's no question that we have to change the subject here."

One can only infer they must mean "stop talking about actual issues that matter to Americans" when they say "change the subject".

Add that to the fact that the McCain campaign has, according to TalkingPointsMemo.com, devoted nearly 100% of his television ad money to negative ads, compared to only about 25% of Obama's ad funds.

What conclusion do you come to?

The conclusion I've come to is this: Their game plan is obvious, you know they're going to go totally negative. The only real question is - Just how low are they willing to go?

And does it matter at all to an American population that cares more about paying for gas and groceries then whether Obama got a deal on his house.