What we're up against (updated)

McCain is seeing his post-convention bounce, and I am, not surprisingly, feeling a bit worried. And I just read a piece from Joseph Romm on the Huffington Post that sums up some of the headwind for Obama:

But a core subtext of the Obama/Biden message is that everything McCain and Palin have been saying is true. Here Obama/Biden are making the two classic mistakes of Democratic campaigns:

1. Thinking the traditional media will act as an honest broker of the truth
2. Thinking that the voters who matter actually pay attention to the traditional media.

Wrong and wrong. What the GOP message machine figured out years ago is that

• The traditional media points out "factual errors" at most once.
• The media can be attacked as biased when it (rarely) does more than that.
• The media hates to call people liars and frowns on politicians who use the word "lie."
• The media in its quest for "balance" treats modest overstatements by one side (ours) as no worse than egregious lies by the other side (theirs).
• Most important, for the key voters, the ones who don't follow politics closely, they don't get most of their information from places like Meet the Press.

My takeaway: when we hear lies repeated ad nauseum, like McCain saying Obama will raise your taxes or that Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere, we need to be ruthlessly consistent in pointing them out. That means letters to the editor; conversations with our friends, families, and co-workers; and anything else it will take to prevent these falsehoods from taking root.

(Video link)

UPDATE

The Obama campaign has called McCain's latest ad a lie for repeating the false assertion that Palin stopped the Bridge to Nowhere.