Team Obama: Back to Square One

Apparently realizing that they've been thrown off their game plan by Palin Derangement Syndrome, Team Obama hits the reset button:

"Today is the first day of the rest of the campaign," Obama campaign manager David Plouffe says in a campaign strategy memo. "We will respond with speed and ferocity to John McCain's attacks and we will take the fight to him, but we will do it on the big issues that matter to the American people."

Part of this "fight" is this new ad:

Ed Morrissey rolls his eyes at the "take the gloves off" talk from Democrats, which is also echoed in the New York Times:

Mr. McCain's choice of Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska as his running mate and the resulting jolt of energy among Republican voters appear to have caught Mr. Obama and his advisers by surprise and added to concern among some Democrats that the Obama campaign was not pushing back hard enough against Republican attacks in a critical phase of the race.

As I noted earlier this week, Team Obama clearly did not anticipate the Palin pick, since her name wasn't included in their pre-set attack on "The Next Cheney." One of the reasons the anti-Palin attacks were so wildly off-target was that the Obama campaign hadn't prepared an oppo-research file on her.

There is nothing more predictable than Democrats reacting to political setbacks by urging that their candidates need to "take the gloves off." This refrain has been endlessly repeated as the all-purpose excuse by Democrats going back to the 2000 Gore campaign. No matter how often they are embarrassed by the attack tactics of MoveOn.org ("General Betray Us"), liberals continue to believe that Democrats could win if only they'd get rougher with the Republicans. "Take the gloves off" is to losing Democrats what "media bias" is to losing Republicans, an all-powerful explanation for their own political ineptitude.