New Republic worried:
The Weird Persistence of John McCain
by The Editors of The New Republic
Wednesday, August 13, 2008
Last week, for the first time in our history, we had an African American president. Barack Obama posed for pictures with Angela Merkel and toured the skies of Iraq with David Petraeus. Meanwhile, George W. Bush was nowhere to be seen, as if he had already handed over the keys to the White House.
Savor the moment. It might not last.
Despite the ecstatic throngs in Berlin and the impeccable Sderot photo-op, Obama's lead hasn't grown in the polls. In fact, as of this writing, it has actually diminished in some polls of Ohio, Michigan, and Minnesota--and evaporated in Colorado. National polls show McCain hanging within a stunningly small margin. (According to pollster.com's average of all polling, he leads by just 2.5 percent.) What makes this margin so stunning is that nothing has gone right for McCain this past month. Obama has owned the news cycle--a fact that has turned McCain and his advisers into contemptuous whiners, complaining about the media's infatuation with Obama and even belittling their own travelling press corps as the "junior varsity" squad.
But, in truth, McCain should be happy that Obama has so dominated the airwaves and front page for these past weeks. These days, McCain's every utterance about foreign policy seems to arrive packaged in an embarrassing slip (sorry, Senator, Pakistan doesn't border Iraq); his crowds are paltry, and his campaign's stage-managing of events (see the cheese-aisle press conference) is downright, well, JV.
Yet, somehow, despite all this, McCain remains in the game. This is not easy to explain--and it should cause a great deal of introspection at Obama headquarters. For all the many ways that the stars have aligned for Obama, he has yet to take full advantage of what historically has been a great opportunity. Of course, we speak of the economy. These are the type of painful times when voters invariably turn to Democrats. So why aren't they turning to Obama in greater numbers?
If you journey to Obama's website, you'll find a slew of terrific policy proposals to fix financial markets and salve the worst blows of the downturn. But if you watch his ads and listen to his speeches, you'll struggle to hear him articulate a consistent narrative for our economics woes. His campaign has been notably devoid of the populist criticism of Al Gore's 2000 campaign--which is a shame, because there are corporations and banks well deserving of opprobrium just now.
And, more importantly, he hasn't found a clear, compelling way to explain the contours of this current crisis--how it reflects structural changes and manifests itself in peoples' lives--a prerequisite for building faith in his capacity to solve it. The model should be Bill Clinton's 1992 campaign, which didn't just relentlessly harp on hard times--it had a clear theory for what caused them. In part, this is a consequence of the prolonged primary season: Obama should have been compiling his general election case many months ago, while he had to contend with Hillary Clinton. And, now, time is growing short. Just because every data point would suggest an Obama victory, doesn't mean that he won't blow it.
The New Republic 2008
TNR TALKBACK [comments]
--A small comment from France: There are many similarities between your US campaign and our last year presidential campaign in France. Segolene Royal won the support of the left in the primaries because she was closest to people and most able to gather support from her own camp. But she was the worst placed to gather votes beyond her camp and to win the election. She had no real economic program, appeared new and improvising on most issues, and could not credibly talk to the right camp. On the other side, Mr Sarkozy had a clear and simple economic message ("work more to make more"), very simple promises ("whatever I say, I will do"), managed to steal votes from the extreme right by annihilating their anti-immigration talk and consistently repeated that victory would be "too easy" because there was no credible opponent. Ms Royal, in contrast appeared young, inconsistent, unexperienced, incredible. If, like in France, US voters go for the most-easy-to-understand candidate with "a consistent narrative for our economic woes", you may end up with the same results as we did...
Francois Montrelay
--Perhaps you overlook the obvious. Has it not occurred to you that familiarity with Obama breeds the suspicion that the man is a shallow, calculating narcissist -- the short of man, in fact, who throughout his political career has usually voted "present" when confronted with a difficult vote? The sort of man who claims always to have opposed the invasion of Iraq when in the first flush of victory he said there was no difference between his position on Iraq and Bush's? A man who would be President without every a day of administrative responsibility?
Eupatrides
There are a number of possible explanations that answer the question, 'why is he not far in front?': - 1) Obama is not known while McCain is and voters have not yet decided whether to go with Obama in spite of all the extra attention. 2) The Economy Stupid. People are not hurting as badly as the media portrays. Yes high gas prices hurt but you cannot pin this on McCain, or Bush even. 3) They are really fearsome of the tax implications of electing not just Obama but a Democratic congress along side him. He is perceived as never being able to hold the spending tendencies of an inevitable majority in a Congress that is held in such low esteem. It is a difficult choice to vote for Obama and if it happens it will be made late in the campaign. It won't be made if he is seen as the expensive candidate.
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