The Bi-Polar Kid

Posted on September 18, 2008 by Sean Elder

No, I’m not talking about the fine piece by Jennifer Egan about manic-depressive children in last Sunday’s Times magazine. I am talking here of John McCain, a man who is changing positions so fast that he must be giving himself whiplash. Does he look at himself at night and say, “Who am I this time?”

This isn’t about the sleazy ads but rather the tactics he once despised. The New Republic reports today that Republicans are using the kind of push polls that Rove & co. used to slander JMC in South Carolina in 2000. Those were about a black child he fathered out of wedlock. (The fact that there was no such child, and the child in question was his daughter adopted from Bangladesh, didn’t stop the racists from running from him.) The polls they are using against Obama ask Jewish voters if it would bother them to learn Hamas supported Obama, and other “statements of fact” sure to put off a few Jews. Though the group behind the polling does not work for McCain, that is the way these groups play. I can already hear JMC defending them as factually accurate, as he did the ad accusing Obama of wanting to teach sex ed to kindergarden kids.

And now the longtime regulation foe is out there trying to reinvent himself as a regulator in disguise. He’s a tough guy, he claims in a new ad, ready to “clean up Wall Street,” when only two days ago he was telling reporters more regulation just meant more bureaucrats, and you know how they are.

Will it play? How stupid are voters? The last eight years might lead you to think: pretty stupid. But even as my Democratic friends on both coasts are wringing their hands and pointing at comets in the sky, a number of conservatives are saying it’s Obama’s election to lose. David Brooks and Rich Lowry were deeply unimpressed with Sarah Palin’s performance on ABC last week, and Carl Cannon (who keeps his political affiliation well hidden) just wrote a bracing blog on the Readers Digest site saying, in essence, the polls are missing the youth of today. And the youth will decide this thing for the Dems.

And that was before this weekend, when Wall Street imploded and the Dow began to tank. Suddenly the Palin pick looks a little less like genius; after hearing her make fun of people with a “big fat resume,” a lot of shaken voters would like some reassurance from people who have been saying for a while that the government needs to be more involved in the financial markets. Now resumes look good, especially if they point to politicians who didn’t look the other way when the bus was headed for the cliff.

Cross pollination

Posted on September 10, 2008 by Sean Elder

There has been much hand-wringing in the last few days about the latest presidential polls. First we had McCain and Obama in a dead-heat and now we have Gallup, CBS and USA Today tracking polls all giving the Republican a definite edge. Given the latest unemployment figures (at six percent, the highest in five years), the collapse of Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, and the American tradition of voters punishing the party in power when the economy goes south, you would think our man would be golden.

A few people have even asked me if these polls aren’t skewed by the media either because a) they need a horse race for the sake of ratings & circulation or b) they’re rooting for the status quo, ie entrenched GOP power. I’m no expert on polling, nor do I play one on TV, but I have heard it said, by people who might actually know whereof they speak, that polling is a crossroads now. After the miserable job they did in the last election, pollsters have still not come to grips with the fact that many younger Americans do not use landlines (which is how polling is almost exclusively conducted) and wouldn’t answer a pollster’s call if they did.

This could be statistically significant given the Dems gains in registering new voters and, as of this writing, our numerical advantage. According to an AP report that appeared today, there are about 42 million registered Democrats and 31 million Republicans nationwide, and we have posted huge gains in key battleground states. A related piece in the Huffington Post makes a convincing case that Gallup et al are drawing on a GOP-heavy sampling of voters. And Republicans love their new cavemom, Sarah Palin.

Far more disturbing are the polls that show independents moving to McCain. I like to think that they did not have their dial moved by the addition of Palin; how independent are you if you support a ban on abortion and advocate teaching creationism in schools? Of course, I might just be out of touch with the values of middle America, and one man’s spunky hockey-mom is another man’s Big Nurse. But I like to think that the people whose job is tracking the electorate don’t know what they’re talking about this time. Just like they didn’t the last…

Nothing Is Inevitable

Posted on September 5, 2008 by Sean Elder

These were among John McCain’s last words in his acceptance speech last night, and as bumper-sticker mottos go, I think it’s pretty catchy. Of course, it causes you to think of the inevitable exceptions to that maxim — death and taxes (though not, Republicans would posit, the “death tax”). They would also like to add to the list: the short memory of voters.

As he heads into the battle season, McCain’s playing a complicated game. He has appeased the base with red meat from this year’s Spiro Agnew, Sarah Palin, while reminding even the most casual viewer of what a white party the GOP is. And now he is trying to get those moderates that remain to remember the earlier McCain: the reformer, the iconoclast, the maverick. (Did you hear that word often enough this week? I half expected them to play the theme song from the old TV show of the same name, though McCain may have been the only one on stage who would remember it. Instead they played Heart’s “Barracuda,” which prompted the song’s author, Democrat Nancy Wilson, to tell EW, “I feel completely fucked over.”)

It is going to be interesting to see how, from his position on the prow of the ship that brought us endless war and a tanking economy, JMC continues to disassociate himself from it. Watching all those red-faced men in blue blazers chanting for change was funny in a Brooks Brothers riot kind of way, but don’t laugh too long. An Obama victory is far from assured; I believe this election, like many before it, will be settled by the least attentive voters, who are moved by their last impression. If theirs is one of John McCain, Moderate Guy, we could lose.

I’m still counting on the stink bomb set off by the W White House to move people in the other direction. The president’s plummeting approval rating over the last four years was not a blip on the screen but a true case of buyer’s remorse. And those who voted for him in ’04 did not just buy the man, they bought the party and the party line. Maybe those who have been burned will remember this time. Another thing that is inevitable is change.