As we probably all now know, people do not remember all of the nuances of a campaign statement. In fact, if a story comes out saying that "Candidate A opposes X," most voters will link Candidate A to issue X and think months later that he supports X. If the public keeps hearing the terms "McCain" and "straight talk" or "maverick" in the same sentence, they will link those terms to McCain, even if the rest of the sentence says that "McCain is not a maverick" or "McCain is not giving you straight talk." This is why the use of language is critical, and the Obama campaign has not done a very good job of it.
As an example, today, in talking about McCain's DHL deal which cost over 8,000 Ohio jobs, David Plouffe said something like "this is not straight talk."
This is awful phraseology. Democrats should banish the term "straight talk" from their vocabulary.
Instead, Democrats should say "this is right from the Crooked Talk Express." Repeat the term "crooked talk" over and over when talking about McCain. Not only does it not reinforce the false concept that McCain is full of "straight talk," the word crooked, a perfectly legitimate antonym for straight, has connotations of dishonesty. If challenged about the phraseology, just say that you mean that crooked is the opposite of straight.
We want to get to the point where, whenever anyone hears the term "straight talk express," they think "crooked talk express," as opposed to "not straight talk express" (and they probably won't even remember the "not" anyway).
Also, stop using the word "maverick" when talking about McCain, even to say that McCain is "not a maverick." Instead, use a different term, such as "McCain is a Bush clone." Every time you say the word "maverick," you are reinforcing the connection between the words "McCain" and "maverick," which is the last thing we want to do. We want to reinforce a connection between the words "McCain" and "Bush clone."
No more "maverick." No more "straight talk express." These phrases are no longer part of the English language.