The "Ruh Roh" Caucus
Michael Gerson recapitulates one of the excuses for the meltdown of the McCain campaign floating around conservative circles:
The diverging political fortunes of Barack Obama and McCain can be traced to a single moment. In the middle of September, the net favorable rating for each candidate was about the same. By Oct. 7, Obama was ahead on this measure by about 16 points. Did McCain suddenly become a stumbling failure? No, the world suddenly went into an economic slide. Americans blamed the party with executive power, which is also the party most closely tied in the public mind to bankers and Wall Street. None of this was fair to McCain, who has never been the Wall Street type. But party images are vivid, durable and almost impossible to shift on short notice.
Previous to this economic free fall — and after his transformative vice-presidential choice — McCain was about tied in a race he should have been losing by a large margin. The public clearly had questions about Obama’s leadership qualities. But the McCain campaign also proved itself capable of constructing an effective narrative: Obama as lightweight celebrity, McCain as maverick reformer. Until history intervened.
What it translates to is, John McCain was doing pretty well at making the campaign about image, but then something serious happened. And faced with a genuine crisis, the public decided it would rather have the black guy with the funny name dealing with it than the war-hero senator it had known and liked for decades. How on Earth does this count as an excuse? "We’d have gotten away with it, too, if not for that meddling economy!" Leave aside whether either candidate can actually master economic events. As Gene Healy argues, people and politicos have outsized conceptions of the president’s role in our national life. And the moment when the question of "Who do we want to deal with this mess?" became bigger rather than smaller is the moment Barack ("Hussein!") Obama pulled away from Captain John Sidney McCain, USN (Ret.). That’s the measure of McCain’s and the Republicans’ failure, not any exculpation.
Comment by Nell —
October 15, 2008 @ 9:32 am
Bingo.
Comment by albatross —
October 15, 2008 @ 9:35 am
McCain was even with Obama at the height of his post-convention bounce. A week before either convention, Obama had a lead, and surely that’s the place from which to measure.
IMO, the financial crisis nailed McCain’s coffin shut, but at least half that effect was because of his “transformative” VP choice, who works pretty much only on identity politics, not on the level of “this is the person I want in charge during a crisis.” A Lieberman or Romney pick would have worked out better for McCain, though I think he’d still have ended up losing as a result of having the word “Republican” branded onto his forehead while the horribly incompetent Republican president presided over yet another disaster.
Comment by Iron Lungfish —
October 15, 2008 @ 9:52 am
To be fair, McCain was starting to lose the game imagewise as soon as people actually started paying attention to Sarah Palin; even absent the financial meltdown, it was a pretty big gamble to try to make it to November on little more than “my running mate shoots moose and looks like Tina Fey.”
Gene Healy’s book is really good. I felt the need to put an extra plug in there.
Comment by pkp —
October 15, 2008 @ 10:18 am
Gerson conveeeniently omits that on Sept. 15 McCain said “The fundamentals of our economy are strong,” only to reverse himself hours later, the first of a bunch of reversals and lurching moves that didn’t reassure anyone. Team Obama started whacking him with that line in his speeches and ads and it cemented McCain as old and out of touch with the problem.
Comment by kid bitzer —
October 15, 2008 @ 10:19 am
i say, let the michael gersons of the world blame it on the economy if they want.
that is a hell of a lot better–a *hell* of a lot better–than their blaming it on acorn, ‘voter fraud’, the librul media, the lack of christian education in the schools, and all of the other stab-in-the-back scenarios that they are cooking up.
look: the republican power-structure that brought the bush crime syndicate into power is not going to release its grasp without a struggle. the struggle is going to be very ugly. irresponsible accusations are going to be slung around, which will make allegations of diebold’s vote-rigging in 2004 look like the sober judgment of posterity.
they are going to look for explanations, conspiracies, scape-goats. and they will look for blood.
if they want to blame the economy instead, then i will heave a sigh of relief.
Comment by Tom Scudder —
October 15, 2008 @ 11:29 am
I think you missed the memo that the economy is the fault of George Soros, Democrats in Washington, and ACORN (which lobbied for loans to low-income borrowers).
Comment by cvcobb01 —
October 15, 2008 @ 11:37 am
Actually, I bet it’s simpler than that.
As soon as the broader public started paying real attention to the election (traditionally post-convention), McCain’s numbers started to decline.
The numbers are just now starting to resemble the Democrat advantage everyone predicted early on, as they should.
I think we tend to overthink this stuff. But the fundamentals have been telling us all along this would happen, and now they are.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
October 15, 2008 @ 11:41 am
In the middle of September = a week after the Republican convention.
McCain was “about tied” at that point because his numbers had been dropping for a week from the brief lead he’d gained after the convention. Look at the RCP national numbers graph: McCain’s trendline from September 17-October 7 is exactly the same as his trendline from September 7-September 17.
Gerson’s horserace analysis is all kinds of fail.
Comment by barrisj —
October 15, 2008 @ 1:24 pm
Frankly, I thought the momentum was lost when His Lanceness left the McPalin campaign and launched his own “I’m back…and it’s not about me, it’s all about cancer” campaign to contest the TdF, and latterly, Il Giro. Ah, well, I guess it really isn’t “Country First”, hmm, dopeur? Loser(s) to the core.
Comment by ed —
October 15, 2008 @ 2:37 pm
Credit where credit is due: Gerson was pretty awesome when the Scooby Gang unmasked him and nailed him as the guy behind the phony baloney ghosts down by the docks at the end of the episode.
Comment by Barry —
October 16, 2008 @ 9:22 am
With Gerson, it’s important to keep one fact in mind – the guy was Bush’s chief liesmith for a while. Nothing that he says should be taken as anything other than lies or bullsh*t.
Comment by albatross —
October 16, 2008 @ 6:07 pm
But if he’s a professional liar, then why aren’t his lies harder to see through? I mean, if you’re world class at spinning lies, you ought to be able to spin something out that takes me days of hard thought to untangle, not ten seconds.
Comment by kid bitzer —
October 16, 2008 @ 9:22 pm
that’s easy, albatross–
because he was the professional liesmith of a man who never hired a competent subordinate when there was an incompetent one available.