would be to come up with a series of ads that attack Bush's personality drama where it hurts. Simply put, some 527 needs to produce a series of ads that portrays Bush as a complete asshole. They need to make him look like someone who you would never want to spend time with and who only cares about himself. Dig up some old college friends who complain about Bush's tendency to use off-color jokes and how it made him uncomfortable to be around. Find some old employees of Bush-ruined businesses who were hit hard by the company's failings while Bush himself came out richer than before. Try to specifically find people who were turned away by Bush when they directly appealed to him for help. This is the sort of ad buy the media would run with. The free media generated from the story will be worth 100 times what it cost to run the ads.

Any good ad campaign should not just be tested in focus groups of swing voters, but focus groups of editors, pundits and news directors as well. As the power of paid media declines, the ability of campaigns to exploit free media must begin to increase.

My response (in comments there) was to disagree, vigorously:

The meme of Bush's affability and regular-guy-ness is now so firmly implanted in the American psyche, that such ads would more likely rebound against Kerry than they would do any damage to Bush. The press won't pick up on them, because "Bush is nice" is part of their standard storyline, and they don't like to debunk their own mythology once they establish it (see the goring of Gore in 2000).

You don't attack an opponent frontally in his area of greatest strength out of picque or annoyance. If you must attack their you come in from the sides with stealth and guile and hope to penetrate their defenses that way, plant a meme and get out -- but first you should consider if there aren't other places you can attack with greater chance of success.

Bush's good 'ol boy persona is so ingrained, that people will most probably still believe in it, even after they've been given the reasons they need to abandon him as a candidate. To try to take him down on that basis is, in my opinion, extremely foolish.

Today, Josh Mashall warns also about the dangers of responding to the Bush campaign lies with a renewed attack on Bush's record (or non-record) in the Texas Air National Guard:

[F]ighting fire with fire isn't a compelling message. Nor will getting into a tit-for-tat about what each of these guys was doing in 1969 or 1970 or 1971 win this race for the Democrats.

Look at the wrong direction/right direction poll numbers and you see pretty clearly that the country is looking to fire George W. Bush. The president's only hope is to get the debate on to issues like these, shift the dynamic of the race, and convince voters that, whatever their dissatisfactions with his administration, John Kerry isn't an acceptable alternative.

When this stuff comes down the pike, Kerry has to fight back mercilessly. And he can win those fights. But, fundamentally, every day of this campaign that isn't spent talking about the sluggish economy and the president's debacle in Iraq is a day wasted, a strategic failure for the Kerry campaign. [Emphasis added - Ed]

So the Bush Swift Boat Lies hit Kerry on multiple levels. Most obviously, they attack Kerry personally by attempting to take the burnish off his record in Vietnam (one of Kerry's strongest attributes), but also, as Marshall has noted, if Kerry doesn't hit back hard against them, they raise the implication that he's a weak sister, not strong enough to run the country during perilous times. Finally, they attempt to deflect attention from what should be the real focus of the election, the dismal record of the Bush administration, especially concerning Iraq and the economy.

Marshall goes on to suggest that a strong way to get the focus back where it belongs and to mount on attack on Bush that's equivalent to the current attack on Kerry is to go after Bush on the grounds of his moral cowardice. (I'm not sure that I can summarize his argument and do it justice, so read his entry.)

I do think that such an effort might be successful, but, as with Chris Bowers' suggestion, not if it's an outright frontal attack. I think such a meme has to be spread suggestively, by implication and (unfortunately) subtle innuendo. It needs to be carried in the very carefully crafted wording of ads that are obstensibly about something else entirely, a tactic that the Bushes (going back to the father) excel at.