The basic identities of the United States’s two political parties have been in place for at least 40 years and, on core economic questions, for 70, since Franklin Roosevelt’s time. Whatever so-called “low-information voters” do or don’t know about politics, they know that the Democrats are the party of the working people and the Republicans are the party of the rich.
It doesn’t end up being as positive for the Democrats as that formulation makes it sound. Since the 1980s Republicans have been successful in shifting public opinion among the US middle class more towards the view that their economic fate is tied up with rich people’s. In addition, a weak union movement means that class consciousness exists only on the margins.
But these basic identities do still mean that, when a scandal breaks out involving oblivious gluttony on the part of elements within the financial over-class, Americans will place more blame on the GOP, and the Democrats will benefit. Especially when it happened on the watch of a Republican administration that is deeply unpopular.
So, it made sense that the initial phase of public reaction to the recent Wall Street scandal would have worked to the political benefit of Barack Obama. The Democratic nominee would have benefited no matter who it was — Obama, Hillary Clinton, Dennis Kucinich, my cat, for that matter. Two weeks ago John McCain had a lead in the polls. Now, Obama does.
McCain helped Obama’s position with an initial response to the economic crisis that seemed to be delivered from a different planet. Last Monday, with headlines blaring and the markets reeling, he insisted that the “fundamentals” of the economy were still “strong”. No doubt that wasn’t very reassuring to the average Ohioan or Michigander.
McCain continued to flounder. He employed ferociously populist anti-Wall Street rhetoric, attacking the “greed” and “recklessness” of the executives who netted, in many cases, eight-figure incomes while gambling away the mortgages of $40 000-a-year earners. But — those age-old identities again — it just wasn’t persuasive coming from a multimillionaire Republican. His legislative record tilts strongly toward supporting deregulation and, over the past year, as he has kissed up to his party’s rightwing, he has sought to downplay the portions of his record that did endorse regulation.
Perhaps worst of all he also proposed a commission to study the problem — at a moment when the Dow, before rallying later in the week, was losing about 900 points, or nearly 10% of its value.
In the face of this, Obama could have spent the week windsurfing with John Kerry and still come out fairly well. What he did instead, with his running mate Joe Biden, was turn his campaign sharply negative against McCain — important to note: not against Sarah Palin — for being out of touch and merely the newest representative of a failed governing philosophy.
“I certainly don’t fault Senator McCain for these problems,” Obama said in his initial statement, “but I do fault the economic philosophy he subscribes to.” He pressed the point much harder as the week went on.
Biden emerged from the relative shadows and gave incendiary speeches, denouncing the Republican philosophy and McCain personally. He denounced the Bush tax cuts and McCain’s new-found embrace of them, citing McCain’s own description from long ago of Bush’s decision to prosecute two wars while handing out immense tax cuts to the wealthy at the same time (“immoral” was the word McCain used).
The Democrats were responding to a rising chorus of discontent within their own ranks that they were just standing around taking punches and letting McCain and Palin set the agenda completely.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, sends American liberals to the cliff’s edge, the whiskey bottle or the shrink’s couch like the perception that their team isn’t returning fire. The belief among liberals is widely held, and I suppose I hold it myself, that both Al Gore and Kerry would have won (Gore, of course, did win, but let’s not get into that) if they’d understood that they were in a no-rules campaign and not a college debating match and behaved accordingly.
The fetid aroma of passivity that began to emanate from Obama-Biden, particularly after the Palin coronation, had partisan Democrats screaming for their candidates to do something. And they did: a study came out last week showing that Obama’s television advertising campaign had become markedly more negative than McCain’s.
And speaking of McCain’s running mate, another effect of the crisis is that it seems to have ended, finally, the Palin-mania phase of the race.
It’s as if God Himself watched the circus and read all the absurd and excessive coverage of pigs and lipstick and said, “All right, I’m going to do something to make these people talk about the economy whether they want to or not.” So, that was phase one of the political fallout of the Wall Street scandal.
In phase two, the shouts and histrionics will abate somewhat. Each day gives McCain — and the Bush administration — opportunities to regain some purchase on events and appear in control. What was important politically in the first phase was demonstrating credible outrage at the fat cats and empathy with the regular folks. In phase two, actual, clear-cut and persuasively packaged proposals will be more important.
Simply because he’s a member of George Bush’s political party McCain clearly has the bigger challenge. With 81% of Americans believing the country is “seriously” headed on the wrong track McCain has to explain why he’ll be so different even though he’s voted with Bush 90% of the time.
However, Obama has always had more trouble with packaging. He has, if anything, too many policy proposals. He finds it hard to pare them down to three or four compelling points and present them in crisp, short sentences. In US presidential politics the packaging is more important than the thinking. And wouldn’t you know it, this Friday brings the first of the three important presidential debates.
This would be a good time for Obama to call in David Mamet to look over his sentences. The election’s outcome could possibly be decided by Friday night. Obama can rely on those age-old perceptions of the two parties, but only if he also reinforces them.
The battle of the TV clips
So, the debates are upon us, writes Michael Tomasky. The first comes this Friday, in Oxford, Mississippi, and is focused on foreign policy. By custom there was not as much campaigning as usual this week as the candidates hunkered down and studied their briefing books and rehearsed their zingers. And rehearse they did, obsessively. They even had supporters “play” their opponent in mock-debate settings.
And why shouldn’t they? These are important moments. They’re the only three chances the people have to size the candidates up, one on one. More is at stake in these 90-minute sessions than in any other event on the American political calendar.
You may be familiar with some of the dramatic, history-turning moments. Gerry Ford saying in 1976 that there was no Soviet domination of Poland. Ronald Reagan asking voters in 1980 to devastating effect: “Are you better off than you were four years ago?” Bill Clinton locking eyes with a citizen in 1992 who asked him to put a human face on the deficit problem, as George W Bush Snr stood by mute. Al Gore sighing too much in 2000.
If that last example doesn’t seem of a piece with the others, there’s a reason. These days, debates aren’t 90 minutes. They’re 72 hours. In today’s media culture of cable television and ideologically competing blogs, there is first the debate itself and then the debate over the debate. The latter is hashed out over the three days following the debate, during which the instant, debate-night conventional wisdom can be turned on its head by the side that has the more aggressive spin operation.
That spin starts during the debate itself. Both sides have teams watching the other guy and recording his misstatements and falsehoods. Emails are blasted to political journalists. By the end of the 90 minutes, the reporters may have 30 or 40 emails in their inboxes.
Then cable TV takes over. There’s an instantly declared winner, based on the pundits’ hunches and focus groups assembled by the networks to watch and react. On the night of the debate everyone may generally agree that Candidate A won. And that’s when the really expert spin begins. Over the next three days the side that was declared the instant loser starts spinning that the initial spin was wrong and they actually won. Sometimes it works.
Hence Gore in 2000. It was generally agreed the night of the first Gore-Bush debate that Gore got the better of things. But in the succeeding days the cable nets, led by the all but openly-pro-Republican Fox, started focusing on the question of Gore’s “condescending” sighs (when Bush lied about Gore’s tax plan, for instance). The sighs, shown repeatedly on cable, became the story, symbolic of the “fact” that Gore was too much a smarty-pants to be president. That weekend Saturday Night Live spoofed them to great effect. The debate that Gore had won in real time was, within days, a debate he’d lost.
Candidates need not only to master the issues. They need to master performance. Cable television will replay clips; the candidate who wins the battle of the clips will be the 72-hour winner. That means getting off the better one-liners. And crucially, it means being ready with a witty riposte to the other guy’s one-liners.
The topic, foreign policy, is McCain’s alleged strong suit on paper — certainly he’s relieved the topic isn’t economic policy, especially given his confused responses to the Wall Street crisis. He will push his support of the surge in Iraq and press Obama on the latter’s support for diplomacy with Iran and on Israel policy.
Obama will emphasise the US’s low standing in the world and the need to get out of Iraq as quickly as is prudently possible. The substance doesn’t matter as much as the theatre. McCain will, for instance, surely needle Obama on the experience question. Obama had better have a sharp and snappy reply to that. If he doesn’t, he could lose the 72-hour debate in that single exchange. This isn’t the democracy Thomas Jefferson had in mind. But as Donald Rumsfeld might say, it’s the one we have.
McCain calls for debate delay
The United States’s presidential election was thrown into disarray on Wednesday after John McCain said he wanted to suspend his campaign and delay Friday night’s debate against Barack Obama to focus on the financial crisis. The Republican candidate made his stunning announcement at the end of a day spent on damage control, amid reports that a firm linked to his campaign manager was on the payroll of the mortgage giant whose collapse precipitated the meltdown on Wall Street.
McCain said it was time to put politics aside and return to Washington to help Congress reach a deal on President George Bush’s proposal for a $700-billion economic rescue package. He did not say he would suspend television advertisements, and did not rule out attendance at the debate.
In response, Obama rejected McCain’s argument that the Republican was trying to rise above politics. “This is exactly the time when the American people need to hear from the person who in approximately 40 days will be responsible for dealing with this mess. It is going to be part of the president’s job to deal with more than one thing at once.”
The University of Mississippi, which is hosting the debate, said the encounter between McCain and Obama would go ahead as planned. —