The GOP will now veer gradually away from the experience argument. Obama needs to keep showing his mettle, but McCain seems to have conceded to some degree that Obama has been "vetted" in the eyes of voters across the left and the center. Even conservatives seem to have acknowledge he can lead, they just disagree with his policies (largely due to historical bias about "liberals"). The item of choice will be fiscal policy, as Palin is not necessarily a strong security candidate.
They will try to scare Americans about how much Sen. Obama's policies will cost; they will say Pelosi is at the head of some sort of spending watershed and that Democrats cannot be trusted on fiscal discipline. For the record, Reagan and W. oversaw the two biggest spending expansions in US history. And H.W. raised taxes. The Reinventing Government program Al Gore ran for the Clinton administration was the most successful and most organized effort ever to counter wasteful spending and "reduce the size of government".
The Bush administration's record on that was: 1) to cut funding for vital programs, like education, veterans' affairs and even combat pay for deployed troops; 2) to direct spending to specific private entities through no-bid contracts. Neither of these did anything to reduce overall spending or the size of government, but both have caused serious harm to actual human lives. Katrina and Iraq are two examples of no-bid contracts causing mass suffering.
Sen. Obama is pushing for a Reinventing Government 2.0, and his fiscal policy is more disciplined and more precisely orchestrated than Sen. McCain's. We need to get this message out. We need to make it clear, we need to show how Barack has a wealth of experience in the fine-points not only of funding public programs, but of orchestrating budgetary priorities in order to keep spending under control, something no Republican president has done in more than half a century (get the historical references and say this every chance you get).
