As I have been observing before, McCain’s campaign, after early signs of engine trouble, is now picking up speed. He’s adjusted his slogan from “Straight Talk Express” to “No Surrender” in classic repositioning tactic –no different from the way packaged goods tweak their slogan when sales start to tank. He’s got Facebook profile and a MySpace presence –as do Obama, Clinton and everyone else.

But will next year’s election be decided on the basis of a slogan, the contender’s social media presence or something else?

A recent poll by the Associated Press says that John McCain has a “solid shares of suburban, college-educated and Midwestern Republican voters.” The Washington Post last Sunday was somewhat optimistic too. “No surrender” is well timed, and probably resonates well with the Petraeus decision. But slogans aside, McCain seems to be doing something right. He may be more analog than digital, but in my opinion that could be what’s makes him more like the real thing.

Having watched the genesis of the YouTube debates, and now the Yahoo election debate, this going to be the first social media election where public opinion is sampled, targeted and better understood before the actual polls.

Markos Moulitsas –he of The Daily Kos – had this to say of supporters’ ability to assemble and the candidate’s capacity take charge of their own narrative:

“Because there are now so many more millions of people who are being engaged by politics online than in the last presidential election, our ability to control or fight back against media narratives is much stronger. We can create our own stories and push back against the ones that are BS. To me, the beauty of this medium is that there are so many centers of power in Netroots that no one can ever really dominate.”

In other words, if every candidate is plugged into the social media, a ‘Facebook President’ may need something extra.

To me that could require one thing: Good old-fashioned momentum generated by good old-fashioned face-to-face communication.