2008 Presidential Campaign Progress Report

1. The crucial event of the campaign, so far, was Obama's serious blunder in choosing Biden rather than Clinton as his VP. This gave McCain an opportunity he has capitalized on very well. Sarah Palin has given Republicans something to cheer about. 2. Obama's campaign lost its momentum as soon as McCain announced Palin as his running mate. But it had a serious problem even before that. The Democrats should have been polling very far ahead of the Republicans. They weren't. Somehow, they were failing to connect. McCain seems to be adept at sensing that and responding to it. 3. Without momentum, Obama suddenly ceased to look godlike. The Olympian stage set at the convention became a joke. I think Obama chose Biden because he assumed he was going to win, and he wanted the ideal candidate for governing. This is a plan for a superior administration. It is better than what I expect from McCain, which is that he will use Palin to win votes and appeal to people but will ignore her views on issues. But when Biden generated a yawn and the aura of invincibility faded, even some Obama supporters became concerned about his Jimmy Carter-like earnestness. His tremendous calmness suddenly began to look like weakness. Nothing succeeds like success, and suddenly Obama's campaign lost that prop. 4. Obama is losing because of the experience argument. Having Biden on the ticket just underscores the upside-down fact that the sage hand -- be it Biden, Clinton, or anyone else -- is playing second fiddle to someone who has little major-league leadership experience. I, myself, am not convinced that Obama would be a superior leader, though I do think he would be a visionary and intelligent chooser of wise policies. Palin is right: she does have more executive experience than Obama. It shows in their bearing. He is great at speeches, but he remains boyish, in a way that does not inspire confidence. 5. McCain appears to be turning talk about the economy, his weak point, into talk about oil drilling, where he has an advantage among voters who seek a simplistic solution. In this sense, Obama is playing with one hand tied behind his back, and he is almost strong enough to do it. Almost. But through the pollsters, the American people are telling him that, in politics, bullshit can grow legs and walk upon the earth. Nobody cares if McCain is grossly distorting things left and right. We already learned this from Reagan. What matters, it seems, is that McCain can keep it coming. You cannot debunk nonsense as quickly as the other side can churn it out. McCain could conceivably go too far, to the point of becoming a laughingstock. But the American people have a demonstrated tolerance for very high levels of nonsense. 6. Obama has tried, but has not been entirely able, to create a sense that he is running a class act, a campaign based upon the kinds of principles that America needs. He seems sincere in that effort, and it does resonate with many people. But as McCain's campaign keeps the punches coming, Obama seems to be getting dragged down to McCain's level. It is a common experience: someone wants to play fair, but then gets punished by an unfair blow, and suddenly it becomes important to just stay alive. Nobody can be perfect, and to the extent Obama espouses a principled approach that he, himself, cannot deliver to the satisfaction of all observers, he risks seeming pretentious and phony. National emergencies and international crises -- hurricanes, Russian invasions of Georgia, and the like -- seem to burnish McCain's standing. Just as in Russia, such events remind voters that they want a strong hand at the tiller, even if it happens to be a dangerous one. McCain is no more invincible than Obama. He seems especially vulnerable in the upcoming debates; he could come away from them looking very bad. But if McCain can survive the debates, he seems likely otherwise to deny Obama a chance to connect with voters on the level of thoughtful, long-term planning for the nation's best interests. At present, it seems that the debates offer Obama a last opportunity to avoid losing in November.

In Admiration of John McCain

Last year, John McCain's campaign was dying. He looked like he was out of the race. He dumped much of his campaign staff and virtually started over. And you know what? Now he's the Republican candidate for president. He may not have much executive experience, but that's the kind of performance you'd expect to see from a CEO who comes in and turns around a failing corporation. I don't know if McCain will be able to stick around and manage the outcome very well afterwards, but he's a Comeback Kid, and there's a place for that kind of ability in the White House these days. This summer, Obama was soaring. He kept making those fantastic speeches. He kept talking about America's dreams and its best side. He appealed to the young. He beat Hillary in a way that left them both able to work together. He was uniting Democrats, he was uniting black and white, he was uniting young and old. While he was touring the world, John McCain was getting ridiculed for touring grocery stores. But McCain kept banging on the drum of experience, even though his experience is not ideally suited for the job. He caught Obama's attention, and eventually he spooked him. Obama chose an elder white male as vice president, thereby simultaneously alienating many of Hillary's followers and sending the signal that he needed support and guidance. Once Obama made that move, McCain was positioned to take the offensive in their chess game. He nominated Sarah Palin. Somehow, he appears to have survived the first potentially disastrous news about her pregnant daughter, her pork barrel spending, her ethics investigation. It seems he may not even have known about all those things. Apparently his gut told him not to care. He went with the big picture and, judging from the reaction to her speech at the Republican National Convention last night, it paid off. Call it luck, call it instinct. Maybe it makes no difference. The net result is, he is still very much in the game. In an election season when the Democrats should be utterly trouncing the Republicans, McCain manages to be very close to Obama in the polls -- especially when you consider the possibility, voiced by one recent commentator, that people do not always tell pollsters the truth in black-white election contests. There is a possibility that breaking even in the polls means that Obama is losing. John McCain has put up a very good fight. It is possibly the best fight that any Republican candidate could have put up. He should take pride in that. I do not think that McCain believes in all of the positions he has embraced this year. I think he has had to play a lot of games to keep alive his maverick image while simultaneously kissing up to the myriad Republicans he has offended. To take one example, I suspect that he was presenting his true views of evangelicals when he made those disparaging comments in previous years. To win, however, he has felt compelled to give them something to be excited about, and Sarah Palin has been just the person for the job. He will pay some attention to evangelicals if he is elected, but my guess is that he will be more interested in putting them back in the box after November 4. Obama is not the only one who wants to be a great president for all Americans. This past week, I came close to backing away from my previous bet that Obama would win. His vice presidential choice seriously diminished my confidence in him, both because I felt it was ill-advised and because I picked up on the lack of confidence that it represented. I leaned back the other way when I saw the initial difficulties Palin was having. Those may still haunt her. People are still sorting out all this stuff. It has been too much, too soon. I decided to stick with my original bet because I still think the economy will be the deciding factor, and I think Obama has the edge there. Seeing what a tremendous campaign McCain is running, however, I am not in a rush to label Obama the winner on the economic issues. McCain beat Obama at Rick Warren's church, by hook or by crook, and he really changed the game with Palin. He is a cunning old S.O.B., and he could do the same thing again, on economic matters. The fun part would be to try to figure out how -- to anticipate how he will make Obama look, once again, like he's standing still. John McCain is not waging an especially clean or admirable campaign. That early aspiration went out the window. Obama is by far the class act in this election. I hope he can stay that way. In the long term, it may be to Obama's advantage, or at least to America's, if he should prove to be the beautiful loser. Al Gore gave us some precedent for that. Of course, it would be even better if Obama became the beautiful winner, or if McCain would at least clean up his act. This post is not praising John McCain's views or behavior along those lines. But for purposes of fighting to win, he is doing a very impressive job, and I wanted to say so.

Palin, Scandal, and Moral Superiority

I don't get it. Republicans spent eight years dragging the U.S. through the mud, in the name of getting to the bottom of whatever Bill Clinton had done and whoever he had done it with. Parents were furious that they had to answer their little children's questions about what a blow job was, and all the other stuff they were seeing on TV. The president, and the presidency, took virtually the entire rap for that goofy binge of prurient curiosity. Nobody was excusing Clinton's marital infidelity. But the Republican Party spent years on that and on every other mud-dredging scandal they could find, in the Clintons' personal and professional matters, going back years before they came to Washington, or even before Bill became Arkansas governor. Has anyone forgotten the huge flap over whether Bill had smoked marijuana, and his bizarre claim that he had not inhaled? Throughout recent decades, a huge chunk of America has smoked dope. Who in the world cared about that, other than the moral police of the right wing? So now we have suddenly come into a new age in Washington politics. It did not arrive in time to prevent the right from harping on Obama's fist-bump or his choice of church or his alleged connections with student protesters in the 1960s, when he was eight years old. But suddenly, lo and behold, we have what could be a trashy woman on the right, in the form of Sarah Palin and family, and all at once people are thinking that it's really not right to invade the private life of a candidate for public office. And I agree with that, with a caveat. The caveat is, don't lecture other people about proper morality or the superiority of your religious faith. Don't cover up the bare-breasted statue of Justice, John Ashcroft, when meanwhile your party's future vice-presidential nominee is baring hers premaritally. Don't suddenly discover that it is OK and wonderful for a child to have her own child, after all these years of complaining about single black mothers. Yes, definitely, let us do focus on the real issues in American governance. Let us, indeed, go back and reconsider the 1990s, give Bill and Hillary Clinton a clean slate, and properly excoriate those who made such political hay out of their self-destructive failings, so that our nation will learn something at last, and will not repeat the same mistakes a few years hence. Let's all finally recognize, for God's sake, that those moralistic conceits gave us George W. Bush; let us have a national retrospective soul-searching for the silliness that brought him instead of Al Gore into the White House. Let us hear people on the right -- especially those of the religious right who have long flaunted a most un-Christlike pride in their godliness -- finally confess their sin and seek to make amends for the terrible wrongs they have perpetrated throughout this country and abroad, in the name of a morality that they, themselves, do not necessarily observe. Let us take, together, kindly but seriously, that step toward a new and long-overdue age of rational politics. Until that happens, I say it's smoke. It's the same political fraud in a new guise: morality as defense, rather than morality as offense -- still used, that is, in a fighting mode, not humbly and self-critically. Yes, let us look carefully at the issues. Let us take a running start at them, beginning with 1992. When we see that kind of soul-searching among the so-called godly folk, then I will believe that enough has been said about the contrasts between Sarah Palin's alleged faith and her actual circumstances.

Sarah Palin: The Clarence Thomas of 2008

I am a middle-aged white guy. If I were a member of a race, gender, or ethnic group that was underrepresented in presidential politics, I am not too sure I would think well of it if the majority group -- black people, say, or women -- came to me and said, Ray, we are going to give you a consolation prize. We aren't going to nominate a white guy as president, but here's some whack-job white guy to represent you. Take your pick: Richard Nixon? Dan Quayle? Adolf Hitler? This is the sort of thing that could backfire. I could find it offensive that the majority's views were so clueless as to think that these guys would represent who I am and what I want from my government. So we come to Sarah Palin. Her views only begin to emerge from obscurity, and I wouldn't be surprised if half of the complaints I've heard about her already are wrong. Nonetheless, this is no Hillary Clinton. She didn't get where she is by being the best, by fighting her way to the top. She got where she is because she's female. She has the potential to be a great politician. Likewise, the members of Milli Vanilli had the potential to be great singers -- but that's not what their concertgoers were paying for. It is as if these white guys were saying, OK, you women can't actually come out on top, so we'll throw you a bone to make it seem like you're equal. The thing would have flown better if McCain had at least chosen a woman who had earned national-level respect and had shown national-level capability. If he's going to embrace the Bush legacy so wholeheartedly, why not Condoleeza Rice? Female, and black to boot, and with global experience. There are accomplished women who demonstrate superior credentials for the task of handling the presidency in a crisis. I predict some women will be supremely displeased at the choice of Sarah Palin -- as I would be, if I were one of them.