Palinmania has washed away the Democrat’s lead in key states
Sarah Baxter, Washington
THE high-heeled, moose-hunting governor of Alaska has sent Barack Obama’s campaign into a state of panic as support for the Democratic presidential candidate haemorrhages in the battleground states he must win to reach the White House.
Sarah Palin, 44, continued to scythe through Obama’s support among women by taunting the first potential black president for declining to choose Hillary Clinton as his running mate and by declaring that questions about juggling work and family were “kind of irrelevant” in the modern age.
The mother of five, who has been called Xena, the warrior princess, said in a television interview: “I think he’s regretting not picking [Clinton] now, I do. What determination and grit and even grace through some tough shots that were fired her way - she handled those well,” Palin said.
She presented herself as a champion of no-fuss, no-non-sense working mothers. “Of course you can be the vice-presi-dent and you can raise a family,” she said brightly. “I’m the governor and I’m raising a family.”
In the face of Palin’s onslaught, Obama has continued to base his campaign on the outdated claim that John McCain and his running mate represent four more years of a failed Bush administration.
A senior Obama adviser said candidly that claim did not work. “I don’t think it’s sticking. The McCain campaign has stolen our message of ‘change’ - the very thing we’ve been campaigning on for 20 months. Well, who’s the change? It’s McCain.” Palin’s astounding rise has left the Obama camp floundering for a new narrative that will capture the imagination of voters in the run-up to the November 4 election. “There is overreaction and panic,” the official admitted. “The hard part for Barack is she’s stolen his thunder a bit. It has knocked us off our game.”
In a series of interviews with ABC, Palin brushed aside charges that she had changed her mind about a notoriously expensive “Bridge to Nowhere” in Alaska and distorted her record of seeking congressional subsidies for her home state. The only “gotcha” moment came when she was at a loss to understand the concept of the Bush doctrine, defined by Charles Gibson, the interviewer, as the right to self-defence by taking preemptive action against terrorists. Gibson, however, has run into criticism from conservatives for patronising Palin over a doctrine whose definition has changed and is not widely recognised outside the world of Washington foreign policy analysts.
Obama’s adviser said the attacks had misfired. “At the end of the day, women are sick of men running everything. They’re thinking, ‘Enough already.’ It has nothing to do with what she stands for. Our mistake was thinking women had nowhere else to go.”
The Democrat cheers that greeted the selection of veteran senator Joe Biden, 65, the chairman of the Senate foreign relations committee, as Obama’s running mate have died away.
“If we had picked Hillary Clinton, we would have saved ourselves three months of anguish over the summer,” the official said. “If we had spent the time unifying the party, we’d be in a totally different place. I’m not sure McCain would have picked Palin if Hillary was VP.”
Palinmania has washed away Obama’s polling leads in several swing states that he had been counting on to win.
A clutch of polls last week showed McCain ahead by five points in Missouri, four in Ohio, four in Virginia and eight in Florida. New Mexico and N e v a d a , t w o t o p O b a m a targets, recorded narrow leads for McCain. Other states that had appeared to be comfortably in the Democratic camp now look precarious. In blue-collar New Jersey, Obama’s lead has shrunk to three points; in latte-sipping Washing-ton, it is down to two.
He is still narrowly ahead in Colorado and Michigan, where Palin has been campaigning energetically, but the ground is shifting beneath his feet. Advisers fear the get-out-the-vote machine that served Obama so well in the primary campaign against Clinton will be overwhelmed by Palin’s legion of female fans. “Are we running a primary campaign in a general election?” the adviser wondered. “Our campaign has an unbelievable ground game. It’s far superior to McCain’s but at the end of the day, people vote on emotion. Do I like you? Do I trust you? Do you care about me?”
A poll by the Associated Press last week showed that white women preferred McCain to Obama by 53% to 40%.
“People still don’t know what Obama stands for. There’s a perceived elitism and something aloof about him. They just don’t connect with him,” the adviser added. “As a person, Palin is very intriguing. She’s attractive and funny and she’s a hell of a speaker. There’s an element of ‘she’s like us’.”
It is all the more galling for Obama’s supporters that Palin has been in the news for little more than a fortnight. Voters told pollsters last summer that they had heard too much about Obama but they cannot get enough of Palin for now.
She remains a high-risk choice for McCain, who has been overshadowed by Palin’s role as “campaigner-in-chief”. The crowds melted away for McCain’s first solo appearance without her last week at a Pennsylvania diner where he was heckled by Obama supporters.
There is still much to learn about the Alaska governor before voters go to the polls. Investigators in her home state are seeking to subpoena Todd Palin, her husband, for his alleged role in Troopergate - a dispute over the alleged dismissal of a police chief for refusing to sack Palin’s former brother-in-law, a state trooper who had fallen out with her family.
The tabloid National Enquirer, basking in new-found credibility after it exposed the former White House candidate John Edwards as an adulterer, claimed in its latest issue that Palin’s 19-year-old son Track was a regular drug abuser who was packed off to the army to clean up. His unit deployed to Iraq last week on the anniversary of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.
The Obama campaign expects support for Palin to subside. It takes comfort from memories of the collapse of Clinton, who was leading by double-digits in the polls when she mishandled a question about driving licences for immigrants. Her standing plummeted.
However, there is little time for voter disillusion to set in. Palin’s working-class, Wal-Mart-mom appeal and moving life story are insulating her from attack.
Her decision to raise Trig, a Down’s syndrome baby, and support for her pregnant 17-year-old daughter Bristol have been widely praised.
At a rally attended by 23,000 supporters in Fairfax, Virginia, last week, Jayne Young, 57, a registered independent, said: “My heart goes out to her family. I liked what she said about being ‘just an average American family’. You can be one of those übermoms and on your kids 100% of the time and they still go off the rails.”
Katherine Hoppe, 65, was wearing a T-shirt emblazoned with the slogan “Another Democrat for McCain”. She worked as a volunteer at Hillary Clinton’s headquarters in Ballston, Virginia, and was present at her concession speech to Obama.
“I felt horrible,” she said. “When McCain announced that he had picked Palin, I went crazy. When you’re my age and Hillary’s, you want to give to the next generation. Hillary did that. She gave us Sarah.”
Clinton is said by friends to be “gutted” that she put 18m cracks in the glass ceiling for women only to have Palin kick in the pane. But she is thought to share Palin’s conviction that the media are treating the Alaskan governor unfairly.
Mark Penn, Clinton’s former chief strategist, said: “The media is doing the kinds of stories on Palin that they’re not doing on the other candidates. People are going to conclude that they’re giving her a rougher time. This is an election in which the voters are going to decide for themselves.”
Some conservatives are concerned that Republicans are overplaying the sexist card. Earlier this year, Palin accused Clinton of “whining” about the attacks on her, but the McCain camp worked itself into an even greater lather last week over Obama’s comments about “putting lipstick on a pig” - regarded as an insult to their “pitbull in lipstick”.
Ramesh Ponnuru, an editor with the conservative journal National Review, complained: “The Republicans are coming across as whiny grievance-mon-gers. Don’t they realise that this harping on ambiguous slights is what people hate about political correctness? It was bad enough when liberals were trying to destroy Palin. Now Republicans are trashing her brand. They’re undermining her appeal as a different, tougher kind of female politician.”
After repeated jabs from McCain, including the false charge that Obama supported sex education for kinder-garteners [Edit: Not a false charge at all], the Illinois senator hit back with a negative advertisement mocking his 72-year-old rival for being out of date and out of touch with computer technology, including e-mail.
It backfired when it emerged that McCain was unable to type because he was injured as a prisoner of war in Vietnam.
The Obama adviser said the Democratic candidate should remain true to himself. “He has to be who he is. When he was totally himself, he was doing so well. He should keep at the things he cares about instead of having people turn him into a pretzel.” |
