Mark Halperin has another one of his lists, this time outlining the things that McCain is underestimating as the general election starts.  Number 10:

That in modern America, perception is often reality and style often beats substance.

Perhaps McCain underestimates this for some reason, but it seems to me that he is the one Republican candidate, aside from perhaps Mike Huckabee, who understands this better than anyone and has used it to his advantage many times already.  McCain and his loyal backers are counting on the perception that McCain is the anti-Bush, the independent maverick truth-teller, will trump the reality that he represents a continuation of almost every policy of Mr. Bush’s administration, and they are being aided in this on a regular basis by gullible or sympathetic pundits and journalists who keep framing every McCain move as an instance of “McCain distancing himself from the Bush administration.”  McCain regularly won among anti-Bush voters in the GOP primaries, and this perception of independence from the conventional GOP line seems to be a reason for his continuing appeal to independents and his ability to outpoll his own party label by ten points or more.  In the eyes of the media, McCain must necessarily be distancing himself from Bush, because they “know” that McCain is the Good Republican and Bush is the antithesis of this.  They are also counting on McCain’s ability to get by without having a clue about numerous areas of policy.  They probably anticipate that he will once again be able to prevail by muttering boilerplate about opposing wasteful spending and the dreaded earmark with the odd gas tax holiday pander thrown in for good measure.  It’s worked before, so why not on a larger scale with the general electorate? 

What Halperin also misses here is that in any contest between Obama and McCain, Obama is the substantive, policy-oriented candidate, while McCain is the one offering mostly pious bromides about victory, service and being American.  If style often beats substance, Obama is in trouble because, as his supporters tirelessly remind us, Obama does have a substantive policy agenda (even if he doesn’t spend as much time talking about it and a lot of his boosters don’t care what it is) and McCain’s entire campaign has been even more driven by biography and character than Obama’s.