Tough Cookies

Yglesias takes a look at the same Pew Poll I looked at, and thinks it's great news for Obama. His reasoning:

[The results] don't, on the face of things, seem like very good news for Obama. But they come in the context of a poll that shows Obama beating McCain by a large 50-43 margin. Meanwhile, it seems to me that the best argument McCain has available to him is to try to persuade voters that Obama isn't tough enough on national security issues. Conversely, Obama's people will try to argue that McCain is too much of a warmonger. Given that a lot of what McCain is going to be looking to accomplish has been done already and he's still losing, this looks like trouble to me.

Similarly, Obama is winning even though he's doing unusually poorly among self-identified Democrats. In particular, older white working class Democrats seem drawn to McCain in pretty large numbers. But you've got to consider that at this point almost ever older white working class Democrat in America has been the target of a lot of messaging from Hillary Clinton arguing that Obama is too inexperienced and too dovish. They haven't, meanwhile, heard any messaging from anyone about how John McCain wants to privatize Social Security and cut Medicare benefits. Obama, in other words, is currently winning despite weakness with this demographic, and is also almost certain to look less weak among this demographic in November than he does today.

Those are two good points. But the first one relies on an important assumption - namely, that the head-to-head matchup poll is indicative of future head-to-head polls. But that is not true, in general - poll leads almost always reverse themselves at least once during the course of an election season. So the question becomes, is the "toughness" result any more likely to persist? If it is, then Obama could find his support steadily erode by nagging doubts about his toughness. Then the head-to-head matchup would switch. And then Obama would lose the election. Ezra Klein also sees this as a possibility:

[T]here's not a Republican campaign machine spending hundreds of millions to scare the bejeesus out of everyone. Yet. When McCain actually goes head-to-head against Obama and attempts to force voters to face up to their apparent belief that Obama is "weak," this judgment could move from a gut sense they have to the reason they decide to vote for McCain. That, at least, is what McCain is hoping.

That is, of course, a worst-case scenario. But this poll makes it seem fairly likely, and I don't buy Yglesias' positive spin.