One of the early important battles is to grab the undecided voters. States are divided into conservative and liberal voters, and poaching some of the guys from the other side is an important part of your long-term strategy. But every state consists of about 10% or so undecided voters (a.k.a. "idiots") who are initially up for grabs. According to the manual and ingame tooltips, a candidate's media bias attribute helps sway undecided voters. So I spend my crucial early political capital (earned by building consultants offices) on a PR consultant. This fella is simply a flat-out +10 to media bias for the rest of the game. Obama's media bias is now 18. McCain's is 6. This is the ingame representation for how Obama can get away with things like changing his mind about accepting public campaign funding, throwing loony pastors under buses, and terrorist fist jabs.

Obama spends a good deal of February holding fundraisers in California, which serves as a sort of money trough for Democrats. Read about McCain's shenanigans after the jump.

McCain's behavior over the course of February is erratic. It must be his notorious temper flaring up. Or maybe his confusion about foreign policy extends into domestic geography.

"Let's campaign in that state in the bottom middle of the map," he says, "the one called Arkansas!"

"Sir, Arkansas has only six electoral votes," a helpful aide, or maybe Joseph Lieberman might say. "Do you maybe mean Texas?"

"Damn it, man, I'm in charge here. Don't you tell me what I mean! We're going to Arkansas!" Then he gives that weird little uncomfortable rictus laugh.

Keep in mind I don't intend this to be any sort of real-world observation about John McCain. I'm just writing fanfic to explain why he goes to Arkansas for no discernible reason. Who goes to Arkansas just to go? I mean, I'm from Arkansas, so I should know.

My actual theory is that sometimes the AI will make pointless moves just to keep from being too competitive. Of course, I see similar behavior on the harder difficulty levels, so maybe it's a matter of the frequency of the pointless moves. Because this month McCain makes similar pointless do-nothing visits to Wyoming and Oregon. He also runs an expensive TV ad in Rhode Island championing his support for the war on terror, which is way down on the game's list of priority vote-getting issues with stuff like school vouchers.

Or maybe it's just a matter of me not being good enough at Political Machine to understand that the 2% awareness boost McCain gets for expending the single stamina point and the paltry $25,000 for a plane ticket to Arkansas will pay off somewhere down the road. We'll see.

By the end of Feburary, the polls show Obama with 293 electoral college votes to McCain's 245. I'm widening my lead.

(Click here for previous Political Machine game diary entry.)