Hail Mary passes

Wayne Brown is a well-known Trinidadian writer and columnist who now resides in Jamaica. This is the twenty-sixth in his Sunday Stabroek series on the US presidential election.

As those familiar with American football know, a Hail Mary pass is a desperate toss; with time running out, the quarterback of the trailing team throws a long, high ball downfield, not so much aiming for as hoping one of his receivers will catch it and carry over the line for a touchdown. The odds of this happening are about one in ten — far oftener, it results in a turnover — which is why it’s usually only tried in the final minutes of a game, when all else has failed.

Imagine, however that, long before then, the opposing side takes the lead, looks to have momentum, and the quarterback loses his nerve and essays a Hail Mary pass, which is picked off by his opponents and run back downfield, so that next time around the quarterback’s even closer to his own goal line than he was before; in fact, now his back’s to the wall. What else is there for him to do but try another Hail Mary pass?

That in a nutshell is where the McCain campaign is. The Democratic National Convention was such a resounding success, what with the indelible image of those 85,000 supporters packing Denver’s Mile High stadium and polls showing a serious Obama bounce, that McCain panicked and, much too early, essayed a Hail Mary pass, selecting Sarah Palin as his running mate.

For a time it seemed it might actually work. Palin, foxy and folksy, hugely excited the Republican base. Polls showed McCain had taken the lead.

The problem was that Palin was a small-minded religious extremist, and a Little League player in the field of adult politics; someone with even less knowledge of the world than GW Bush in 2000 (and there’s no way of putting that more strongly).

And the McCain campaign’s remedy for this − which was to accompany her selection with a blistering preemptive attack on “the liberal media,” to shriek “sexism” if a reporter so much as inquired into Palin’s record, and to commit to shielding her from that same media for the 60-plus days then remaining in the campaign — was a silly hope in the age of 24/7 news coverage.

When the dust cleared, it was clear the Palin pick had failed to seduce either the Hillary Democrats or the swing voters — and that even her success with the Republican base had been exaggerated.

(The claim that she’d pulled 23,000 to a Virginia rally turned out to be false: State authorities estimated that crowd instead at 8,000, which admittedly was many times the size of the crowds McCain had been pulling on his own, but which would have represented a routine day for Obama.)

Next, trying to ease the media’s pressure, the McCain camp reluctantly let Palin be interviewed after all, and McCain’s Hail Mary pass promptly collapsed. Not only was Palin’s seamless ignorance of the world apparent. More horrifyingly, it dawned on commentators that when she averred that being able to see Russia from Alaska counted as foreign policy experience, the lady was not being coy.

Five leading conservative columnists broke openly with her choice, and her favourable-unfavourable ratings changed drastically, from high positives to the negative column. As of the beginning of last week, McCain’s first Hail Mary pass was coming straight back down the field at him.

So McCain threw his second Hail Mary pass, announcing he was suspending his campaign to “bring leadership” to the debate over the Paulson Wall Street bailout bill. If there was no bill, McCain said, he would not participate in Friday’s presidential debate.

This turned out to be mere bluff and grandstanding: the McCain campaign went right on campaigning, and by Friday midday, with no bill in sight, announced McCain would participate in the debate, after all.

But what’s clear is that, as Palin is exposed — however reluctantly — to the media, the ‘Palin rot’ is not just continuing but accelerating.

Wrote Peggy Noonan in the (right-wing) Wall Street Journal last week: “The U.N. photo-ops were a staged embarrassment. Keeping the press away made her look infantilized. With Katie Couric she seemed rattled. In the Charlie Gibson interview it was not good when she sounded chirpy discussing possible war with Russia. One should not chirp about such things. Or one wouldn’t if one knew the implications.”

More than that, McCain’s suggestion that the first presidential debate be postponed to displace the vice-presidential debate scheduled for this Thursday raised suspicions that the campaign was trying to get out of the Palin-Biden debate altogether. Ed Shultz, the (Democratic) talk-show host, reported that “senior McCain people are more than concerned about Palin. The campaign has held a mock debate and a mock press conference; both are being described as ‘disastrous.’ One senior McCain aide was quoted as saying, ‘What are we going to do?’ The McCain people want to move this first debate to some later, undetermined date, possibly never. People on the inside are saying the Alaska Governor is ‘clueless.’”

Nowadays you can see the hunted look on Palin’s face whenever the cameras get near enough to capture it. This is a woman who knows it’s not too late for McCain to jettison her.

Judith Warner astutely summed it up in the NYT on Friday:

“…when I saw the photo of Sarah Palin with Henry Kissinger, a funny thing happened. A wave of self-recognition and sympathy washed over me, rising up from a source deep in my subconscious. I saw a woman fully aware that she was out of her league, scared out of her wits, and hanging on for dear life.”

Now, the reader may think the end of a week in which high drama, and melodramatic and divisive posturing by McCain, have threatened to stalemate any remedy to the dead-serious matter of Wall Street’s potential meltdown is not the time for another Palin column. That view is understandable.

One woke this morning, eg, to news of the largest bank failure in American history: Washington Mutual, floored by a run on the bank in which panicky depositors withdrew $16 billion in three days, had been bought by the government and (luckily) sold at once to JP Morgan.

But at time of writing, McCain’s second Hail Mary pass is still up in the air (though the figure in the end zone best positioned to catch it isn’t wearing a McCain jersey); the politics of the bailout bill are as Byzantine as they’re petty; and what’s ultimately at stake is something much bigger than McCain’s current poll numbers: the end of 38 years of Reagan-Thatcher laissez-faire policies and of the systematic impoverishment of middle classes everywhere, left unprotected by the dismantling of FDR’s New Deal.

And the fact is — and here of course the football sequence goes askew — the ramifications of McCain’s first Hail Mary pass are still unfolding. That ball, having been intercepted, is still being run back, and, as the Palin meltdown continues, it’s not at all clear it won’t go all the way, to an Obama touchdown.