Wisconsin Is Not in 'Holding Pattern'

Update: Obama Ground Report: Canvassing in Waukesha, Wisconsin and Record-low seventeen percent of Wisconsin voters think the country is going in the right direction

The political wisdom of some (the Washington Post's Dan Balz, for example) is the next 10 days in August will see the presidential race in a holding pattern.

Nothing could be further from the truth of course, and this applies emphatically in Wisconsin.

Two dynamics continue here:

- Barack Obama's on-the-ground field operation (that rivals his Internet operation's superiority to the McCain camp's) is hitting the ground running

- Barack Obama will pull away in fundraising, no matter the sleazy finance machinations of John McCain and the rightwing independent slime merchants

In Dane County (Madison), Wisconsin, Obama's field headquarters are being bombarded with requests for yard signs [people are told they have to wait a few weeks].

It's August, and Obama has already amassed a large local volunteer base left over from the February 19 Wisconsin primary that arguably set Obama's victory in the Democratic primary in stone.

On the air waves, John McCain is everywhere in Wisconsin, which is viewed as a major Republican takeover target. The flush and agile Obama campaign matches McCain ad-for-ad. But not in McCain's negativity that McCain views, reasonably on a national level in a certain desperate sense, as his only conceivable path to victory, a la Hillary Clinton.

McCain's problem in Wisconsin, as his campaign has settled on the Karl Rove attack strategy and embraced a Karl Rove clone as chief-message-attack (they are the same for McCain) man, is that Wisconsinites more than most, do not like personal attacks in politics.

I mean Wisconsin is not Tennessee. But you would not know it from John McCain's TV spots.

McCain's people either don't know or don't care.

And we have not seen the large-scale operations Obama has in store yet.

To use a baseball metaphor: Obama is ahead by six runs, it's the bottom of the sixth inning for the home team Obama, the bases are loaded and Prince Fielder just came up to bat.

By the time the convention theater opens in late August and the supposed holding pattern ends, McCain will have already lost Wisconsin, and Obama will have done more than enough to win the nation.