Bobo is “Calling Dr. Doom,” and says John McCain and Barack Obama are exhibiting unmerited confidence that they will win in the fall, and that it is time to inject some anxiety. Mr. Herbert writes about “A Gift to the G.O.P.” and that the Democratic Party’s war with itself can only make you wonder about its vaunted claims of moral superiority when it comes to tolerance. Here’s Bobo:
It took Christopher Columbus about 70 days to get to the New World — a bit less than half as long as it took us to get through the 2008 primary calendar. But by Tuesday night, we’ll have reached our destination, and people in the Obama and McCain camps are feeling good about themselves.
Neither campaign is planning a major pivot for the fall. Both are confident they have a strategy for victory.
So my role today is Dr. Doom — to break through unmerited confidence and raise the anxiety level in both camps.
Since effectively wrapping up the nomination, Barack Obama has lost 7 of the last 13 primaries. Obama’s confidants say that this doesn’t matter. In states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, primary election results are no predictor of general election results.
That’s dubious. Though voters now prefer Democratic policy positions on most major issues by between 11 and 25 points, Obama has only a 0.7 percent lead over McCain in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. His favorability ratings among independents has dropped from 63 percent to 49 percent since late February.
Furthermore, Obama has spent the past several months rolling up his sleeves and furiously courting working-class votes. It doesn’t seem to be working. Ron Brownstein of the National Journal calculates that Obama did no better among those voters in a late state like Pennsylvania than he did for 26 out of 29 earlier primary states where he lost the working class.
There is something about his magic that resonates powerfully with the well-educated but doesn’t translate with the less-educated. As a result, you get all these odd poll results. Voters agree with Obama’s original position on Iraq, but according to the Pew Research Center, they trust McCain more to handle the issue.
We haven’t had two presidential candidates as far removed from the mainstream suburban lifestyle. McCain’s family has been military for generations. But Obama’s path through the university towns is particularly elusive.
Peter Hart did a focus group for the Annenberg Public Policy Center with independent voters in Virginia that captured reactions you hear all the time. These independent voters were intrigued by Obama’s “change” message, but they knew almost nothing about him except that he used to go to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s church. It’s as if they can’t hang Obama’s life onto anything from their own immediate experiences and, as a result, he is an abstraction. As Hart points out, people’s inability to come up with a clear narrative about Obama could make it easy to label him in the fall.
Finally, the Obama people are too convinced that they can define McCain as Bush III. The case is just factually inaccurate. McCain will be able to pull out dozens of instances, from torture to global warming to spending, in which he broke with his party, as Rush Limbaugh will tell you.
The Republican camp, meanwhile, is possessed of the belief that Obama is a charming lightweight. Republican senators have contempt for Obama’s post-partisan image, arguing that he and his staff refused to even participate in backroom bipartisan discussion groups.
But Obama is far from a lightweight, as Republicans will learn if he agrees to do joint town meetings with McCain. McCain’s jabs that Obama is naïve will backfire. In this climate, a candidate can’t define the other guy, only himself. When McCain attacks Obama for being naïve, all voters see is McCain being sour and negative.
More fundamentally, McCain’s problem is that his party is unfit to govern. As research from the Republican pollster David Winston has shown, any policy becomes less popular when people learn that Republicans are supporting it. If the G.O.P. sponsored the sunrise, voters would prefer gloom. Many Republicans are under the illusion that they are in trouble because they’ve betrayed their core principles. The sad truth is that if they’d been more conservative, they’d be even further behind.
I’ve spent the past few years trying to find conservative experts to provide remedies for middle-class economic anxiety. Let me tell you, the state of free-market thinking on this subject is pathetic. There are a few creative thinkers (most of them under 30), but for the most part, McCain is forced to run in an intellectual void.
Today, he is scheduled to give a forceful speech on why “reform” is better than “change.” He plans to describe how to remobilize government and address economic anxiety. But McCain’s reform message is only being carried by him and a few bloggers. Obama can draw on a coherent body of economic work and 10,000 unified voices.
This election will be asymmetric. Obama has to come up with a personal narrative voters can relate to. McCain needs to come up with a one-sentence description for why he represents a clean break and a compelling future.
Neither campaign has done that. I don’t know what they’re so happy about.
Bobo, it’s hard to come up with a description of how you represent a “clean break” when you’ve voted with The Current Occupant 100% of the time in 2008. Here’s Mr. Herbert:
Talk about self-inflicted wounds.
The Democrats may finally be stepping away from their circular firing squad. It took them long enough.
There are so many things that the Democrats need to do to have any chance of winning the White House in November, and it’s awfully late in the game to begin doing them.
Only now is the party starting to rally around Senator Barack Obama, who has been the likely nominee for the longest time. No one knows how long it will take to move beyond the fratricidal conflict that was made unnecessarily bitter by Bill and Hillary Clinton.
The cry of “McCain in ’08!” at the Democratic rules committee meeting in Washington over the weekend came from a supporter of Senator Hillary Clinton.
It reminded me of Bill Clinton’s comment that “it would be a great thing if we had an election year where you had two people who loved this country and were devoted to the interest of this country.”
He was talking about Hillary Clinton and John McCain. The former president’s comment played right into the sustained effort by opponents of Barack Obama to portray the senator as some kind of alien figure, less than patriotic, not fully American, too strange by half to be handed the reins of government.
Senator Obama’s effort to counter that line of attack has been all-but-completely undermined by the incredible shrieking pastors from the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, a place that might be good for the soul but is potentially ruinous for a presidential aspirant.
First came the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr. with his videotaped, over-the-top sermons. He didn’t just criticize the United States, but damned it. The Wright controversy was a body blow to the Obama campaign, and it hasn’t fully recovered yet.
I made a crack in a column last week that Senator Clinton, who had no discernible route to her party’s nomination, was waiting for a Rev. Wright on steroids to burst into view.
Within days, we had the astounding video of the Rev. Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest who put on a grotesque performance in the church that could hardly have been more racially offensive toward white people or more personally offensive toward Senator Clinton.
His rant, cheered by the audience, was one of the worst I’ve seen in many years. Senator Obama announced on Saturday that he had quit the church.
This was supposed to have been the Democrats’ year. But instead of marching to victory, the party has been at war with itself in some of the ugliest ways imaginable. There was a time, not that long ago, when Democratic voters were crowing about how happy they were with all (or almost all) of the potential nominees.
But the Clinton and Obama partisans spent months fighting bitterly on the toxic terrain of misogyny, racism and religion. It can only make you wonder about the vaunted Democratic claims of moral superiority when it comes to tolerance.
This should have been the year when the Democrats just hammered the Republicans over the economy, the war, energy policy, health care, appointments to the Supreme Court, the failure to rebuild New Orleans, and so on. The list of important issues on which the Republicans are vulnerable is endless.
Instead of running for cover, the G.O.P. is growing ever more confident that it will be tossing inaugural balls for John and Cindy McCain come January.
There is no end of blame to be apportioned among the Democrats. The Clintons have behaved execrably. But weak-willed party leaders showed neither the courage nor the inclination to stop them from fracturing the party along gender and ethnic lines.
As for Senator Obama, he’s been mired in a series of problems of his own — problems that have done serious damage to the very idea that brought him to national prominence in the first place: that he was a new breed of political leader, a unifying candidate who could begin to narrow the partisan divides of race, class and even, to some extent, political persuasion.
Can the Democrats still get their act together?
Only if they hurry. The party will have to exhibit extraordinary unity, coming together quickly to heal the wounds of this long and bitter primary. Senator Obama will have to develop (again, quickly) an exceptionally compelling economic program while trying to strengthen his appeal across ethnic and class lines.
The Democrats have done far more damage to themselves than the G.O.P. could ever have inflicted.
And they do it every 4 years, like clockwork.
