Is McCain's campaign really worse?

A lot of people have been talking about how badly run the McCain campaign is. Oliver Willis points to their latest ad as just another example of a campaign misfire.

But is the McCain campaign really being run any worse than past campaigns? Is it really that different from past GOP campaigns? Bush's campaign focused almost exclusively on trivialities, yet he "won" twice. Could it be that the political environment has changed so much that the techniques that used to work just look laughable now. Were they always laughable, but people just weren't laughing enough?