Campaign on Empty
By Eugene Robinson
Washington Post
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Probably, John McCain and Sarah Palin will lose this election. Certainly, they deserve to.
With a campaign designed more to play on insecurities than to promote ideas, McCain and Palin have practically framed Barack Obama's "closing argument" for him. "The question in this election is not 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' " Obama told an audience yesterday in Canton, Ohio. "We know the answer to that. The real question is, 'Will this country be better off four years from now?' " The Republicans don't even try to formulate an answer, and with Obama's lead growing by the day, it's hard to imagine what might turn things around.
An "October surprise" international incident might end up working against McCain rather than for him, given his all-over-the-map reaction to the financial crisis. The vaunted Republican get-out-the-vote machine looks almost puny beside Obama's next-generation juggernaut.
There's always race, of course, and we can't say with certainty whether there's some huge, hidden racist vote out there just waiting to emerge next Tuesday. My hunch is that race is already factored into the poll numbers -- that it has already been "discounted by the market," to use financial jargon that's fashionable these days. I believe that race is a subtext of Republican attack words such as "dangerous" or "socialist," and that it's the real substance of the attempt to paint Obama as unknown, mysterious, exotic and somehow alien. My guess is that voters who are responsive to this kind of coded appeal have already responded.
So we're not likely to see some kind of deus ex machina salvation for McCain, Palin and their down-ticket allies, and that's as it should be. It's not just that they have run a weirdly erratic campaign, bitingly sarcastic one minute, earnestly serious the next, uncertain whether to present McCain as a serious, experienced statesman or as a hypercaffeinated, overeager publicist for Joe the Plumber. It's not just that Palin, and let's be honest, should never have been allowed anywhere near the ticket -- and certainly not anywhere near those frocks from Saks and Neiman Marcus.
(More here.)
Washington Post
Tuesday, October 28, 2008
Probably, John McCain and Sarah Palin will lose this election. Certainly, they deserve to.
With a campaign designed more to play on insecurities than to promote ideas, McCain and Palin have practically framed Barack Obama's "closing argument" for him. "The question in this election is not 'Are you better off than you were four years ago?' " Obama told an audience yesterday in Canton, Ohio. "We know the answer to that. The real question is, 'Will this country be better off four years from now?' " The Republicans don't even try to formulate an answer, and with Obama's lead growing by the day, it's hard to imagine what might turn things around.
An "October surprise" international incident might end up working against McCain rather than for him, given his all-over-the-map reaction to the financial crisis. The vaunted Republican get-out-the-vote machine looks almost puny beside Obama's next-generation juggernaut.
There's always race, of course, and we can't say with certainty whether there's some huge, hidden racist vote out there just waiting to emerge next Tuesday. My hunch is that race is already factored into the poll numbers -- that it has already been "discounted by the market," to use financial jargon that's fashionable these days. I believe that race is a subtext of Republican attack words such as "dangerous" or "socialist," and that it's the real substance of the attempt to paint Obama as unknown, mysterious, exotic and somehow alien. My guess is that voters who are responsive to this kind of coded appeal have already responded.
So we're not likely to see some kind of deus ex machina salvation for McCain, Palin and their down-ticket allies, and that's as it should be. It's not just that they have run a weirdly erratic campaign, bitingly sarcastic one minute, earnestly serious the next, uncertain whether to present McCain as a serious, experienced statesman or as a hypercaffeinated, overeager publicist for Joe the Plumber. It's not just that Palin, and let's be honest, should never have been allowed anywhere near the ticket -- and certainly not anywhere near those frocks from Saks and Neiman Marcus.
(More here.)
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