If this all reads like a post-mortem, it's because it's already begun.
The Draper piece from the New York Times Magazine is a must read. Draper describes the campaign as a series of tactics without an overall strategy. Short term gains pursued relentlessly without reference to their long-term role in winning the election. Which makes it a lot like the Bush Administration, no?
Joe Galloway of McClatchy News says that the GOP campaign is "summoning ugly ghosts," depending on guilt by association and fear-mongering to win support among the electorate.
Timothy Eagan notes that by focusing on the goodness of "real America" McCain and Palin are basically conceding the urban centers that represent the best educated and most economically dynamic parts of the country. This is a losing strategy and makes the GOP "the party of yesterday."
David Brooks says that McCain never escaped the limitations and constraints of the GOP base, thus alienating the center and preventing him from becoming president.
McCain has picked up another endorsement, but it's one he wishes he hadn't: Al Qaeda seems to think a McCain presidency would be good for their future prospects. And they are right, for his resolve to "stay on offense" promises only to increase their appeal in the Muslim world.
Leave it to Paul Krugman to isolate the central reasons why McCain and company are feeling blue: (1) the fundamental failure of GOP economic dogma has voters running for cover, but more importantly, (2) McCain just hasn't run a serious campaign...returning us to the Draper piece, cited and linked above. He writes:
.As someone who’s spent a lot of time arguing against conservative economic dogma, I’d like to believe that the bad news convinced many Americans, once and for all, that the right’s economic ideas are wrong and progressive ideas are right. And there’s certainly something to that. These days, with even Alan Greenspan admitting that he was wrong to believe that the financial industry could regulate itself, Reaganesque rhetoric about the magic of the marketplace and the evils of government intervention sounds ridiculous.
In addition, Mr. McCain seems spectacularly unable to talk about economics as if it matters. He has attempted to pin the blame for the crisis on his pet grievance, Congressional budget earmarks — which leaves economists scratching their heads in puzzlement. In the immediate aftermath of the Lehman failure, he declared that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong,” seemingly unaware that he was closely echoing what Herbert Hoover said after the 1929 crash.
But I suspect that the main reason for the dramatic swing in the polls is something less concrete and more meta than the fact that events have discredited free-market fundamentalism. As the economic scene has darkened, I’d argue, Americans have rediscovered the virtue of seriousness. And this has worked to Mr. Obama’s advantage, because his opponent has run a deeply unserious campaign.
Think about the themes of the McCain campaign so far. Mr. McCain reminds us, again and again, that he’s a maverick — but what does that mean? His maverickness seems to be defined as a free-floating personality trait, rather than being tied to any specific objections on his part to the way the country has been run for the last eight years.
Conversely, he has attacked Mr. Obama as a “celebrity,” but without any specific explanation of what’s wrong with that — it’s just a given that we’re supposed to hate Hollywood types.
And the selection of Sarah Palin as the Republican vice-presidential candidate clearly had nothing to do with what she knew or the positions she’d taken — it was about who she was, or seemed to be. Americans were supposed to identify with a hockey mom who was just like them.
In a way, you can’t blame Mr. McCain for campaigning on trivia — after all, it’s worked in the past. Most notably, President Bush got within hanging-chads-and-butterfly-ballot range of the White House only because much of the news media, rather than focusing on the candidates’ policy proposals, focused on their personas: Mr. Bush was an amiable guy you’d like to have a beer with, Al Gore was a stiff know-it-all, and never mind all that hard stuff about taxes and Social Security. And let’s face it: six weeks ago Mr. McCain’s focus on trivia seemed to be paying off handsomely.
But that was before the prospect of a second Great Depression concentrated the public’s mind.
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