Why is liberalism traditionally considered "bad" but conservatism is seen as "good"? Why are Democrats quickly tagged as "tax-and-spend wimps" but Republicans labeled "tax-cutting protectors"? All of the above description are unfair, but they hold sway in some quarters, particularly among Republicans and even among some of the independents Obama will need to win. But forget that the traditional image of Republicans as strong on defense and wise with tax dollars is questionable. Forget that it has been tainted by the Bush administration's economic fumbling and war mongering. Forget it because John McCain is running away from George Bush's record and on the traditional value set of the Republican Party. Since Sarah Palin's advent on the GOP ticket, many independents now view McCain as a champion of the Reagan-style GOP. That perception must change for Obama to have a clear glide path to victory. And for that to change, Obama has to deepen and broaden his marketing strategy. Effective marketing promotes the brand AND the product category. Coke is the tastiest of soft drinks. Tide is the best of laundry detergents. You need a Hoover because you need a great vacuum cleaner. You have to have an iPod because a great MP3 player is essential to human life. The brand can only be successful if the category is seen as valuable, too. Brand and category are co-equal parts of effective selling. The same holds true for good political messaging. Yet this simple principle has been largely ignored by Democrats for a generation. The Republicans have never forgotten it. Obama may be a great brand, but his category—Democrat—is often perceived in the negative terms outlined at the start of this post. The same holds true about McCain: good brand, bad current perception of the GOP category. So McCain is forced to run AGAINST his category as a reformer. In fact, he's actually running as an agent of change against TWO bad categories: Democrats and modern Bush Republicans. In so far as Obama's message is effective in tying McCain to Bush, McCain also inherits the blame for high gas prices, a faltering economy and two wars. That has seemed to work until recently. But then McCain selected Sarah Palin and switched his message from experience to change through reform. McCain's competing message of change has begun to blunt Obama's message. Why? Because McCain's new message allows him to shed the legacy of Bush's modern Republicanism and run on the "old-school" GOP platform in regards to domestic policy. The fact that overall violence and American casualties in Iraq have decreased gives McCain some breathing room to stick with Bush's foreign policy. If Palin is the lipstick on McCain's policy pig, McCain's shift in strategy is the grease on that pig. Obama will have a harder time laying his hands on it now, especially if he doesn't shift his strategy, too. Obama, who also has tried to distance himself from traditional liberalism as a kind of Democratic maverick, has two choices: He can try to tie modern Bush Republicanism even more tightly around McCain's neck by branding him "more of the same" (as he is now starting to do) or he can try to undercut the GOP category in general to cover all the bases and cut off McCain's political escape route through reform and traditional Republicanism. Obama really needs to do both. He should tie McCain and Bush together like Siamese twins AND undercut the GOP category. Obama's negative ads should start mentioning McCain's party, something they haven't explicitly done yet. One other thing Obama should do: Since he is positioning himself as the mirror opposite of McCain—as a maverick Democrat—Obama has to guard his brand AND his category. He has to wear the Democratic badge more proudly and champion his image of a new-style Democrat with some very old-style Democratic values like job security, Kennedy-style military strength and equal rights for women. Obama's campaign signaled its understanding of McCain's strategy shift by rolling out a new slogan of its own this weekend: "Change we can believe in" is now "Change we need." The new slogan represents a subtle but important shift in Obama's framing of the race—a move away from the idea of change dependent on Obama's credibility to the idea of change dependent on what's best for the nation. Whether Obama's team uses that frame to accommodate the deeper, broader strategy of brand and category remains to be seen. The tactics of attack and counterattack will change daily. But when category is included in the strategy, the overall way forward for Obama seems to define itself.