Peter Wehner gives a spot-on assessment of what Senator McCain needs to do in the remaining weeks before election day:
This past weekend has made it clear that Obama’s unremittingly liberal voting record, as well as some of his past associations (weirdly excluding the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, which is the association that deeply troubled a lot of us), will be an issue during what I have called Act III of the McCain campaign.
What remains to be seen is whether this line of criticism will succeed given the current environment. If so, the case McCain makes needs to be powerful and precise, accurate and believable. He must convince a large segment of the public that his argument is not backward-looking but is instead intensely practical. To be more specific, McCain need to demonstrate to voters why Obama’s past record and associations will shape, in important and harmful ways, how Obama would govern as president. To invoke a line used by Senator Biden during last Thursday’s debate, McCain needs to explain why “past is prologue.”
Read the whole thing.