Republicans are urging John McCain to adopt more aggressive tactics against Barack Obama amid fears that the White House is slipping away from them.
With ballots already being cast in battlefield states from Virginia to Ohio, Republicans are panicking that voting is taking place against the backdrop of the catastrophic events on Wall Street and that McCain could be a casualty.
Although McCain pumped out negative ads throughout August and September, Republican state leaders and officials want to see him becoming even more personal, exploiting Obama’s links with figures he knew in Chicago. These include William Ayers, a former member of Weather Underground, a group involved in a 1970s bombing campaign in the US; the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his controversial former pastor; and Tony Rezko, the land developer convicted of fraud and bribery earlier this year, who had contributed to his campaign funds.
Robin Smith, chairperson of the Tennessee Republican Party, in one of a series of interviews with state party leaders published on the Politico website this week, urged McCain to intensify his attacks on the Democratic candidate. ”People need to see a gladiator who’s willing to defend what exactly he stands for,” Smith said. ”We’re not talking, for instance, about the radical associations that Barack Obama has with Ayers, Tony Rezko and so on. More could be done.”
The chairperson of the Republican Party in Indiana, Murray Clark, also advocated raising Obama’s ”troubling relationships”. Obama lost the Indiana Democratic primary to Hillary Clinton, in part because of a row raging at the time over Wright.
”I think those things will come up in Indiana again and they do have an impact on mainstream voters in Indiana. You call it going negative, [but] whoever … is in a position to point out these relationships, I think it’s helpful,” Clark said.
Republican jitters increased with the publication of a series of polls showing Obama opening up leads in the battlefield states that could determine the election.
Polls in those states over the past few months have mainly shown the two in a dead heat. But Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University polls published this week put Obama on 51% to McCain’s 43% in Florida, Obama 50% to McCain’s 42% in Ohio and Obama 54% to McCain’s 39% in Pennsylvania. The candidate who takes two of these three would be well on the way to winning the election.
Republicans expressed regret that McCain was not more forceful in the first of the debates on Friday in Oxford, Mississippi. Jeff Frederick, chairperson of the Republican Party of Virginia, which is normally solidly Republican in White House elections but is now a swing state, showed disappointment with McCain’s debate peformance on the economy. ”He really left a lot on the table while Obama was kind of hitting him,” Frederick said.
There is a backlash among senior party figures and officials too over his dramatic intervention in the congressional wrangling over the Wall Street bail-out and over his choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate. Her lack of foreign policy experience has been mercilessly exposed by the media and made her the butt of jokes on comedy programmes and mainstream news broadcasts.
Palin faced Obama’s vice-presidential running mate, Joe Biden, in their only scheduled debate of the campaign, in St Louis, Missouri, on Thursday night.
This week Palin was holed up in McCain’s home in Sedona, Arizona, swotting up on foreign policy, economics and national domestic issues. Her older sister, Heather Bruce, in an interview with Glamour magazine, graphically summed up the intensive preparation she is undergoing. ”It is absolutely phenomenal what my sister can learn in a short amount of time. What’s happening to Sarah Palin right now is like the worst college exam cram period ever,” Bruce said. —