Obama can't get angry, so Biden and Clinton will have to.The Republican 'fightback' in the American presidential contests is real and has resulted in a small, almost negligible overall lead for John McCain of around two per cent of those who state a preference. Barack Obama is still polling at around forty four per cent, and there are still some ten per cent of voters undecided.
However, the American election is decided in the electoral college. I have been recently playing with Real Clear Politics' Electoral College Map. If one makes an assumption that Obama and McCain will win the states that are solidly for them, then I have to say, of the remaining, there are three routes to a tie. For example, if McCain took New Hampshire, Ohio, Indiana, Nevada, and Virginia, but Obama took Michigan, Pennsylvania, Colorado and New Mexico--a tie results.
In such circumstances a 'faithless elector' or the Congress, houses voting separately, would elect the President and Vice President.
I wonder if treating the polls as reliable is sensible, however. Firstly, as the campaigns of Tom Bradley, and the two Harolds, (Washington and Ford), showed, and as the primaries more pertinently indicated, about four points have to be deducted from any black man's lead in opinion polls. Washington, as the most successful of those individuals, and because he came from Chicago, also throws up all sorts of lessons about Obama's style of coalition assembly too.
Secondly, as the Obama people point out, pollsters are guessing what the cellphone-bearing young will do. There is therefore a range of around seven percent on any Obama performance figure in addition to a two or three per cent margin of error. Scientific polling, a product of American marketing, may well come unstuck in this campaign.
Thirdly, it isn't the case that Obama and Biden are not fighting back. They have a superior organisation to McCain, and more money. They are also working on state markets and below the radar of the national press. This seems a separate strategy from the one we would have seen if Clinton had won the nomination, which would have been based around Mark Penn's nineties-tribute tune, dealing with 'microtrends'. Federal strategies, rather than national ones, and appeals to particular groups such as returned veterans and their families, and industrial workers, seems to be the order of the day, and it could become effective at the state (and therefore electoral college) level.
Smile, take the doorsteps and shiv the enemies with the rules; whilst Rove is playing Atwater, Obama is playing the Chicago way. It's a city I know and love and used to teach in, and I think part of the problem of reportage is that coastal journalists haven't quite got how it works.
This is all very well, and part of the Holy-Roman Emperor game of American politics. What are today's PanaMcCainiac tactics?
That campaign are clearly trying to get Obama to reach back to Dukakis' belated 'fightback' in 1988, or to Gore's bellowing 'people not the powerful' in 2000. Both of these strategies resulted, I might point out, in a bigger vote than Clinton got in 1992, and a lot of favourable press coverage. At least, for Dukakis they did. That technocratic robopol was even compared at one stage to Harry Truman, ludicrously.
Yet Obama can't do it. Is anyone seriously suggesting than an angry black man is what his campaign needs?
So Joe Biden is going to have to do it in the debates. Senator Biden is a brawler, which is one of the reasons I like him. An Irish blowhard throwing a beauty queen down some stairs isn't unknown to my culture, but it isn't pretty television either, so Marcus Aurelius Biden is going to have to develop the caution gene. This is a man, as I dimly recall from Richard Ben Cramer, who grew up playing on top of skylights.
Meanwhile, the campaign seems to have taken a decision to let the Palin-McCain show inflate under the gaseous effluence of its own contradictions.
Don't tell me they don't exist. Earmarked spending? Twenty six years in Washington? Rape victims charged for medical examinations? Foreign policy? The deficit? These are serious, slightly out of perspective issues which will play on voters in this campaign, just as the embittered former liberal republican Lincoln Chafee's quote about Palin being a 'cocky whacko' will occur to others too. The question is whether this will happen before or after the election, and before or after any hurricane damage, market collapse or Iran war.
We aren't primarily playing the culture wars anymore. Culture worries are the mud on top of the plates. The plates are made of worries about banks, trust funds, college fees, jobs, mortgages, debt, abortion and islamism. It is to these concerns a cautious Obama, and a message that McCain is strong, wrong and desperately reckless, ought to play.
Things hang upon events. The Waziristan war appears to be moving into a new phase, which will lead into a very deep darkness quite quickly. If it does so, I think Obama and Biden are probably more insulated than Palin and McCain. It's a mark of how dark the energies of an American political campaign can be that that can be written, by the way--I understand the point that people are dying as I sit at my computer and sound off.
Some of the Republican contradictions were expertly exposed to a huge public via the high-audience show 'The View' yesterday, whilst serious stories about Palin's record continued to leak out just as she was doing a Miss South Carolina impersonation on the Charlie Gibson show. I might point out that Ms South Carolina was not auditioning for world politics and shouldn't be held to the same standard as someone with those pretensions, in case I seem unfair.
There's another serious point that occurs to me here. The British, it seems, have released details of a conversation with the British Foreign Secretary, who is a lightweight joke, at the height of the Georgia crisis. It was interesting to me, behind the level of 'effing and blinding' that Gospodin Lavrov clearly had no respect whatsoever for his counterpart, which makes him more or less an honorary citizen of here.
It's also symptomatic of the way New Labour has always operated, with whispers and unnamed sources. Yet this method is counter-productive, and frankly silly, at the foreign policy level. Diplomacy may well be lying for one's country; but these Foreign Office jokers don't 'get' that their silly teen-school tactics are a bad mistake in the big league to which they aspire. You get beyond the point with some people, frankly, when you just can't be bothered to engage with their tedious delusions.
Is the Russian respect for strength going to displace the Russian wish to be taken seriously if Palin ever dared lecture them as she did this week with some misplaced nonsense about sanctions?
All very interesting. The final analysis, as the Kennedys used to say to preface some pabulum or other, is that no one knows what is going to happen. The backdrop to this campaign are some very very serious troubles that could define the fate of the world for decades.
We should pray for the west when we reflect that God is just.
Comments