Why Is Obama Campaigning Against Himself?

So having reviewed much of what the Obama campaign is doing wrong, it is fair to ask what McCain is doing right.

Michael Barone says that the old fighter pilot has been "Getting Inside Obama's Loop."

Senator McCain was trained as a fighter pilot. In his selection of Governor Palin, and in his convention and campaigning since, he has shown that he learned an important lesson from his fighter pilot days: He has gotten inside Senator Obama's OODA loop.

That term was the invention of a great fighter pilot and military strategist, John Boyd. It's an acronym for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act.

"The key to victory is operating at a faster tempo than the enemy," Boyd's biographer, Robert Coram, writes. "The key thing to understand about Boyd's version is not the mechanical cycle itself, but rather the need to execute the cycle in such a fashion as to get inside the mind and decision cycle of the adversary."

For a fighter pilot, that means honing in above and behind the adversary so you can shoot him out of the sky. For a political candidate, it means acting in such a way that the opponent's responses again and again reinforce the points you are trying to make and undermine his own position.

Read how McCain has applied this strategy. It starts with his selection of Sarah Palin as running mate. The Obama people and their friends in the media go into a tailspin from there.

As Barone admits, Charlie Martin at American Thinker ("McCain and the OODA Loop") got the story first and provides more detailed analysis.