Palin filin
Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the twenty-fifth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.
If Obama prevails in November, future historians retelling the campaign of Am-erica’s first African-American president will no doubt give several pages to the events of the past 10 days.
Before them, the Obama campaign had been unfocused and tentative, clearly thrown off balance by the way that Sarah Palin had come out of nowhere to ignite the Republican base; and the polls were moving dramatically in McCain’s favour.
Today, just ten days later, the situation has been reversed; it’s McCain who’s flailing and Obama who’s re-energized, while the polls shift back to their pre-conventions’ lineaments: Advantage Obama.
McCain had first closed the gap with Obama in late July, when — astoundingly — his campaign managed to spin Obama’s ecstatic reception in Berlin into proof of his ‘un-American-ness’ and to dismiss him as a “celebrity.” (Why the Obama campaign didn’t scornfully throw that one back — ‘Quit whining! Just because you can’t fill a school auditorium…’ — remains a mystery to this columnist.) And the celebrity diss was reinforced days later by the Obama-Paris Hilton ad, with its transparently racist thrust.
Then in August Russia’s invasion of Georgia had given McCain a chance to play himself — “We are all Geor-gians!” etc — and to indulge in the sabre-rattling that, one fears, may well be the gut response of a man who was once tortured and has waited 36 years for payback.
In August, too, the soaring price of gas gave McCain the chance to sell Americans on the need to extend offshore drilling — this, while Obama equivocated.
The timing of the Republi-can Convention, right after the Democrats’, cut short Obama’s convention bounce (and distanced the image of his 85,000-strong ‘rainbow coalition’ rising, tier upon tier, like an encamped army, under the stars in Denver’s Mile High Stadium).
And finally there was McCain’s galvanic Veep pick, Sarah Palin. As September began, McCain surged ahead of Obama in the polls.
Last week’s equally dramatic swing back to Obama was due to several factors:
1. A rash of McCain anti-Obama assertions and ads that were so blatantly and smearingly mendacious that they provoked media protests — including from the respected Associated Press — and established the narrative of McCain as having descended into the gutter. The ‘L’ word has long been taboo in presidential elections, but the McCain campaign went so far that — first on the popular daytime talk show, ‘The View,’ and then increasingly in the print media — hosts and columnists accused McCain of “lying.” (Wrote Richard Cohen in the Washington Post, in ‘McCain Has Turned Ugly,’ ‘And so McCain lied about his lies…’) This was particularly significant because it undercut the ‘honourable maverick’ image that, till then, had been McCain’s chief attraction to independent voters.
2. The earthquakes shaking Wall Street last week, which could not have come at a worse time for McCain. To the extent that economic matters interest him at all, McCain is a laissez-faire Reaganite and longtime friend of Washington lobbyists. He narrowly escaped indictment in the ‘Keating 5’ scandal; he has long been a supporter of deregulation; and it was comical to watch his flip-flops last week as the fearsome threat of Wall Street’s meltdown grew. From his “The fundamentals of the economy are strong!” — delivered, haplessly, on Monday, even as Lehman Brothers went under — to his shrill threats to “fire” this one and that one, McCain changed positions almost daily as the electorate’s angst, and the Bush administration’s desperate nationalizing of huge, imperilled firms, came home to him. (Tom Toles’s McCain cartoon depicted a graph zig-zagging from “pro-Bush” to “anti-Bush,” “experience” to “Palin,” “deregulator” to “regulator,” “no bailouts” to “bailouts,” and “honorable campaign” to “mud,” while a bystander observes: “Worse than watching the stock market.”) The fact that the American electorate has long linked national security and Republicans, and the economy and Democrats, suggests that, even without McCain’s spectacular display of ideological arthritis and irrelevance, the current Wall Street drama would have concentrated the minds of the electorate and tossed the ball back into Obama’s court.
3. The startling decline in popularity of Sarah Palin.
The fact is, the Palin pick was always an act of political desperation, — and Republi-can Senator Chuck Hagel finally said it last Thursday — an insult to the electorate. Yet, given the Republicans’ bellicose bawling of ‘sexism’ at any journalist who inquired into Palin’s Alaska record, it took the lady’s own painfully undergraduate performance in her first, ABC interview to dramatize her unsuitability.
Even then, it was the comedy shows — in particular Jay Leno and ‘Saturday Night Live’ (attracting its biggest audience in six years) — which led the charge in bursting the Palin balloon.
Alongside them, the mainstream media — clearly irritated by the McCain campaign’s silly attempt to shield their wallflower candidate from questions — contributed a steady drip of unsavoury revelations that quite undercut Palin’s claims to be a reformer, an opponent of earmarks, and a champion of transparent government.
As one commentator summarized it, Palin “appointed unqualified cronies, abused her power to punish personal enemies, and has displayed a Cheney-esque passion for government secrecy.” Palin supported ‘The Bridge to Nowhere’ until its prospects had vanished; despite her boast of having put the state airplane on eBay, she failed to sell it there; she never visited Iraq as she claimed; her visit to Ireland was in fact an airport refuelling stop… and so on.
The spread in Palin’s ‘favourability’ ratings went from plus 17 to minus 4, a staggering 21-point drop in one week. No less than five of the most prominent conservative columnists (David Brooks, Charles Krauthammer, etc) pronounced her unsuitable to be vice-president. By Friday, columns (one titled ‘Quaylin’ Palin’) were comparing her to Dan Quayle, GHW Bush’s clueless Veep.
Palin retains her ability to excite (sic!) the Republican base; she is, after all, an anti-abortion Creationist with a fetish for big guns! But the numbers are in, and they show she’s also energized Democrats — including ‘Hillary Democrats’ — and has had virtually no effect on swing voters. It’s a fair guess that even moderate Republicans will increasingly develop immunity to her charms as they get a better look at the ‘replacement president’ John McCain is offering them.
All this has been reflected in the polls, which between Wednesday and Friday showed Obama newly competitive in Florida and Ohio, while the week’s national polls came in as follows:
Quinnipiac, Obama by 4; CBS News/NY Times, Obama by 5; Rasmussen Tracking, Tie; Hotline/FD Tracking, Obama by 1; Gallup Tracking, Obama by 5.
As remarked last week, the latter polls aren’t yet significant — except that they’re all trending to Obama. (Gallup’s daily tracking poll, in particular, has steadily taken Obama, one point at a time, from 4 points down 10 days ago to 5 points up on Friday.) And they will begin to matter in a couple weeks’ time.
If by, say, the end of the first week in October the major polls agree that either candidate is leading the other nationally by six or more points, you can start taking that candidate to, well, the bank.
