Weeping and wailing

Suddenly, with seven weeks to go to the presidential elections, the Democrats are weeping and wailing, and gnashing their teeth over Sarah Palin, John McCain’s last-minute, galvanic running mate. As Gail Collins caricatured their response in the NYT last week: “[Obama]’s going to lose! Sarah Palin is getting all the attention! The Republicans are so mean! Why isn’t he tougher?”

To an extent, they’re right to be worried. As this column has remarked, Palin instantly became the walking wet dream of the Republicans guns-and-churches hordes, and she has been pulling crowds — 23,000 in Virginia last week — that only Obama could previously command. So much so that McCain dare not appear without her any more (and risk being unable, once again, to fill a school auditorium).

Indeed, the really historic thing about Palin’s selection is that it marks the first time in American history that a presidential nominee is being dragged towards the White House on the coat-tails of his running mate, and not the other way around.  (Wrote Collins, tongue in cheek: “McCain, by the way, is the Republican nominee for president. You may remember him from the Sarah Palin convention in St. Paul.”)

The Palin effect is apparent not just in the crowds but in the polls, which suddenly have McCain for the first time leading Obama nationally, by 1 to 4 points. And with the race for the White House now entering the home stretch it’s time to start looking closely at these. Not at the national polls, however — they mean little at this stage — but at the polls in the battleground states, and the likely Electoral College vote (EV) totals.

To do so is to understand Collins’ next sentence: “Cheer up, Obama-ites. You’re overreacting.”

As of today (Friday) the electoral college votes show a virtual dead heat, Obama 217, McCain 216, with 105 EVs being toss-ups. (269 EVs are required to win the presidency.)

Significantly, however, six of the nine battleground states representing those 105 toss-up votes were won by GW Bush in 2000 and 2004, which means that Obama is currently attacking McCain in six states — Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, Nevada, New Mexico and Indiana — while McCain is on the offensive in only three: Michigan, Pennsylvania and New Hampshire.

Moreover, Obama is currently leading McCain in two of those red states, Colorado and New Mexico, and is seriously threatening him in Nevada and Virginia, while holding onto his own lead in the aforementioned blue states.

If on November 4 these nine states break the way they’re polling today, Obama will have won the presidency, 273–265.

This isn’t to say the Palin effect isn’t being seen at the state level. But it’s been mainly apparent in the Deep South — intriguingly, Obama’s support in the Midwest appears to have risen as a result of Palin — which means that Palin has so far been instrumental in making safe for McCain a number of red states where Obama might have fancied his chances, rather than in helping him lay siege to Obama on his own turf.

Thus Obama last week effectively ended his bid to compete in Texas and Georgia (and of course Alaska), and may soon decide to give up also on Missouri and North Carolina, both of which he had been eyeing. But word is that McCain may likewise be about to throw in the towel on Pennsylvania (a huge concession!) in order to defend Ohio, where he now leads Obama by only 2 points, and which he, McCain, absolutely must win. And McCain will also have to defend Virginia and Nevada, where he leads by only three points and one point respectively.

The voting shifts caused by Palin shouldn’t be surprising; her selection was aimed chiefly at energizing the Republican base. And while, in this, the wolf-shooting ‘dominatrix’ (one Daily Kos blogger’s scandalized term for Palin, who enjoys shooting wolves from small planes) has succeeded beyond the Republicans’ wildest dreams, the flip side is that Palin, with her militant anti-abortion, anti-stem cell research, and anti-equal pay for women stances; her interest in banning certain books from public libraries; her ridiculous claim to foreign policy experience (“You can actually see Russia from Alaska,” she told ABC’s Charlie Gibson on Thursday evening, with the air of one smugly imparting a QED); her deer-in-the-headlights moment when asked by Gibson about “the Bush doctrine”; her nonsense about the Iraq war being a war against “the terrorists who attacked us on 9-11” (an alibi even the Bush administration has long abandoned); and her startling willingness to countenance a war over Georgia between the nuclear superpowers, the US and Russia (a piece of feckless recklessness that should, however, raise alarms at the thought that she was here merely expressing what she knew to be her presidential nominee’s thinking) — to say nothing of the steady drip of unsavoury revelations concerning her behaviour as governor of Alaska — all this is as likely to repel as to attract those voters who will ultimately decide this election, the independent or swing voters.

It’s not difficult to see why, despite Palin, last Tuesday’s MBC-WSJ pollster concluded that Obama was “doing all that he needs to do to win.”

If, by that poll, enthusiasm among McCain voters has nearly tripled since Palin, to 34 per cent, that’s still far behind Obama’s “enthusiasm quotient” among Democrats, 55 per cent. Palin has netted a 9 per cent increase in likely voters for McCain, but that’s almost the same as the 8 per cent increase Biden achieved for Obama.

Most significantly, perhaps, the NBC-WSJ poll found that, for the first time, majorities of voters declared themselves comfortable with the thought of an Obama presidency and felt that he shared their values.

In light of such numbers, it’s difficult to know whether Bill Clinton was merely saying what he was expected to say when he averred last Wednesday that Obama was going to win “pretty handily” in November, or whether that most astute of American politicians meant it.

In reporting on what’s now a nail-bitingly close race, this column will be paying increasing attention to the battleground states’ polls in the remaining weeks, so some caveats need to be noted. The polls are inherently unreliable in a couple of areas.

One is in the responses they cull from closet racists, who may be unwilling to announce their prejudice to a pollster but in the privacy of the voting booth ‘will never vote for a black man.’

And the other is in their chronic under-representation of  Obama’s most powerful constituents, African-Americans and the young, many of them unpolled because they own cell phones rather than land-lines, or because they’re newly registered voters whom the pollsters have not yet integrated into their data bases.

It’s impossible to know to what extent, or to whose advantage, these two variables cancel each other out.

That’s one reason why racism remains the white elephant in the room of this election. And why trying to decipher the outcome of an election of such epochal import, not only for the US but for the world, can at times induce something like vertigo.