Senator McCain’s campaign, which like the American economy was rocked by the financial crisis, has not found a way to mitigate the damage, let alone turn it to McCain’s advantage. The financial meltdown that’s unfolding reversed the momentum McCain had built after the convention and dramatically shifted the storyline of this campaign. It has easily become the most important development of election ’08 and, in fact, one of the most important economic moments in the last 75 years. The magnitude of what’s happened is enormous; suffice it to say that we live in a different economic world than we did only a month ago.
That has made it doubly difficult for Senator McCain to execute his end-of-the-campaign strategy, which is to highlight Senator Obama’s liberal record and his past associations. The attention of the public is riveted on other things, and it’s not at all clear what McCain can do to alter that fact.
The McCain campaign’s task is obvious: to find a way to turn the issue of the economy to their advantage. That is easier to say than to do; Obama has a significant advantage among voters when it comes to who is better able to fix the problems plaguing the economy, and voters hold the GOP more responsible for the credit crisis than they do Democrats. Unfortunately for Senator McCain, then, the campaign is ending with an intense focus on an issue where McCain (and the GOP) is weak rather than strong.
Senator McCain has had several weeks and two debates to change the arc of political events since the financial crisis hit, and he simply hasn’t succeeded. After an uneven couple of days, he has actually tried one fairly bold approach and then another, from suspending his campaign and returning to Washington to try to hammer out a deal to the mortgage purchase proposal unveiled (but not well-explained) during Tuesday night’s debate. Senator McCain’s hope is that he can somehow get traction with some line of argumentation. But so far, nothing has worked; as a result, there’s a frenetic quality to the campaign. I should add that I have some sympathy for the McCain campaign; running a presidential election (like governing) is a lot more challenging than commenting on it, and lots of pundits have lots of advice, most of which is not nearly as clever as they think.
Senator McCain is a fighter and a gambler, so he will undoubtedly try a mix of things to knock Obama off stride and get himself back on track during the next three-and-a-half weeks. He has another chance to try to jolt the course of events, at next Wednesday’s debate at Hofstra University. But that’s an enormous amount of importance to place on a single debate, against a skilled, agile, and seemingly unjoltable opponent.
The truth is that this has always been a very good year to be a Democrat, and Barack Obama has turned out to be a more formidable and appealing candidate than many Republicans had hoped. (His performance in the Democratic primary should have alerted Republicans to his talent and the skill of his organization.) Senator Obama certainly has weaknesses in terms of his record (deeply liberal), his achievements (which as a legislator are almost non-existent), and his past associations (disquieting). But he is quite good at defending his areas of weakness, and his campaign is first-rate: disciplined, well-organized, and extremely well-funded.
It’s true that in politics, things can change fast. For the sake of John McCain, they had better. He is now in the position of having to engineer a remarkable political comeback. It’s possible, but it’s not the place you want to be less than a month away from an election.
