TNR’s Noam Scheiber flags an interesting quote from Obama strategist David Axelrod:

“Even though Senator McCain has been on the scene for three decades, there are a lot of people who don’t know a lot about him — and there are a lot of people who don’t know about us,” said David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s senior strategist. “Both campaigns are about to begin filling in the gaps.”

Scheiber interprets Axelrod as claiming that the “McCain brand isn’t nearly as familiar to most people as we in the political media assume,” which will help Obama because it will be “much easier (and cheaper) to create an image on a blank slate than it is to replace an existing one.”

But I don’t think this is quite right. Clearly, McCain is well-known to the public. I think Axelrod is saying that people “don’t know a lot” of negative information about him. The reason is that McCain was for some time one of the few politicians who both Democrats and Republicans praised. Until recently, he had never been the subject of serious criticism from the left at the national level. As a result, his public image was and is softer than someone who’s already withstood a great deal of criticism from the other party. (Imagine Bill Clinton in, say, 1996.)

The problem for Democrats, however, is that Obama’s never faced serious criticism from the right at any level.