What seems to be missing from the election campaign, at least for some of us, are statements from the Coalition side that point out – using triple underlining, heavy bold and in italics – that over the last six years we have seen possibly the worst government in Australia’s history, now as before led by someone for whom to know him is to loathe him. On the personality of the Prime Minister, Andrew Bolt has an incredible story about the views on the two candidates put on facebook by the make-up artist who did them up before the debate. It is impossible to imagine just how abrasive a personality Kevin Rudd must actually be if you have not experienced it yourself. But here is the testimony of someone who has:

I have had a very similar experience! Must run in the family as Mr Howard and Mr Costello were gentlemen with a capital G. Mr Abbott is following in their footsteps. The other, I could not even face book how he treated the crew. Just abhorrent!

But we are not voting for Mr Congeniality but for the Prime Minister and these things do tend to fall by the wayside. Each of us in the end will have to decide who has the mix of policies that represent our own values and political aims. And on this, the fight is by no means over, polls or no polls, betting odds or not. Longshots get up. Rudd has a strategy and it is the one that he shares with Barack Obama who equally ought to have lost in a landslide but won it nevertheless.

Roger Franklin at Quadrant Online has a quite important article, Labor casts a misleading ad campaign (discussed by Andrew Bolt here), in which he looks at the Obama technique of slicing and dicing the electorate, aiming a message at each voter in an almost personal way. Is there something you really care about more than anything else? That is what you will be promised, and the message will be delivered to you almost as personally as it can be, as a tweet, as an email, as an SMS, or as an ad on your favourite program. And if you go to Roger’s article, as an added bonus, you get to hear my interview with 2GB where I discussed the Obama technique and the way those same techniques are being applied by Rudd.