Against ‘cockiness’
In an election season that’s seen enough historic moments to satiate a Wagner, it’s noteworthy how suddenly and how often ‘The Narrative’ has turned. Last week’s column (written on the Friday), in which this columnist asked why, with all the signs favouring Obama, no US commentator had yet ‘called’ the election, landed in print accompanied by a host of headlines in US Sunday papers like this one: ‘Obama on Track to Landslide.’
Suddenly they were all ‘calling’ it for Obama. And their prediction was seconded by the public lamentations, and even defections, of many high-profiled Republican activists and columnists.
Chris Buckley, son of William F., ‘the father of the modern Conservative movement’, broke ranks with his famous ancestor to endorse Obama, praising the Democrat’s ‘first-class temperament and first-class intellect’ and opining that Obama ‘has in him the potential to be a good, perhaps even great leader,’ while deploring that McCain’s campaign had made him ‘inauthentic’. (Wrote Buckley of McCain: ‘A once-first class temperament has become irascible and snarly; his positions change, and lack coherence; he makes unrealistic promises, such as balancing the federal budget ‘by the end of my first term.’ Who, really, believes that? Then there was the self-dramatizing and feckless suspension of his campaign over the financial crisis. His ninth-inning attack ads are mean-spirited and pointless. And finally, not to belabor it, there was the Palin nomination. What on earth can he have been thinking?’ For this ‘betrayal’, the ‘National Review’ accepted Buckley’s pro forma resignation from the editorial board of the Conservative movement’s flagship magazine, which William F. Buckley had founded.)
It was a sign of how many Republicans were throwing in the towel that many now stopped pussyfooting around McCain’s running mate pick and, like Buckley—or like George Will, who had early called Sarah Palin ‘a disaster’ and who asked rhetorically last week: ‘Obama in a romp in November? Don’t be surprised’ —explicitly panned the vice-presidential candidate.
Christopher Hitchens (whose support for Bush’s Iraq war has been unwavering) wrote in Slate: ‘The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: “What does he take me for?” Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. Her conduct has been a national disgrace…’
Leading conservative commentator David Brooks diagnosed that ‘Sarah Palin represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party.’
And Matthew Dowd, G.W. Bush’s former strategist, was perhaps harshest of all, scathingly pointing out Palin’s unreadiness for the White House and adding that McCain ‘knows that in his gut. And when this race is over, that is something he will have to live with…He put somebody unqualified on the ballot, and he put the country at risk.’
Meanwhile, the Democrats were suddenly gloating. Democratic Congress(wo)men began publicly envisaging not just an Obama presidency but a filibuster-proof Democratic majority in the Senate. The pro-Obama blogs called for McCain and the Republicans to be not just defeated but ‘crushed’. ‘It’s over,’ said James Carville on CNN, more than once.
By Thursday Obama was warning his followers against being ‘cocky’. The next day he urged them to beware of ‘snatching defeat from the jaws of victory’.
He was right. No sooner had the ‘L’ word become the week’s CW (despite McCain’s best performance of the debates) than polls showed the race beginning to tighten. In the past week, the story of the big tracking polls, Gallup and Rassmussen, has been of a gradually diminishing Obama lead nationally, from recent highs of 11 and 7 points to 6 and 4 points respectively (though ‘outlier’ newspaper polls, like the NYT’s and the Washington Post’s, insisted Obama’s lead had in fact grown, to double digits). State-level polls were more ambiguous. Several showed Obama coming within striking distance of McCain for the first time in such blood-red states as Georgia, West Virginia, North Carolina, and even North Dakota, while at the same time his modest leads in the big red states of Ohio and Florida appeared to be evaporating. Obama, still attacking, was about to set off on his ‘red state tour’. McCain and Palin were mainly, but not only, falling back to defend Ohio, Missouri and Virginia. Now, it may well be (this re last Sunday’s column) that ‘the Bradley effect’ will be sufficiently muted this year to be more than countered by the reported huge increases in African-American and youth turnout in the early-voting states. But the polls are showing too many alleged Undecideds this late in the day for them to be taken at face value. In the Democratic primaries, those ‘late Undecideds’ broke for Hillary by a ratio of 7 or 8 to 1: they, it turned out, were the covert racists, after all.
So in assessing the presidential race, one (admittedly, over-cautious) way of interpreting the polls would be to assume that all Undecideds (10 out of 10) wind up voting for McCain. Give Obama, in other words, only those states where his lead over McCain is bigger than the total percentage of Undecideds.
Making that adjustment tightens the race considerably. It’s a measure of McCain’s distress that all the battleground states are red states; and that, even giving McCain the Undecideds en bloc, Obama still wins four of them: Colorado, Virginia, New Mexico and Iowa. Along with the Kerry states, these would be enough to put Obama over the top, though only with 284 Electoral College votes (270 is the magic number) and not the 330-350 EVs many talking heads had just begun predicting.
By that math, however, Obama loses the big states of Ohio and Florida, along with Nevada, North Carolina and Missouri. And that means that he must hold on to Pennsylvania (which John Kerry narrowly won in 2004).
Obama’s lead in Pennsylvania has been in healthy double digits for some time. But the Pennsylvania primary was where news broke of Obama’s ‘bitter-cling’ remark (which Sarah Palin has been resurrecting at her every campaign stop); and rural Pennsylvania is at the heart of guns-and-churches, ‘Reagan Democrats’ terrain.
Ominously, Pennsylvania’s Democratic Governor Ed Rendell, an Obama supporter, has twice publicly averred (once in the primaries, and again last week) that Pennsylvania is a ‘racist’ state that ‘will not vote for a black man’, never mind what the polls say. (The fact that Rendell later apologized for the ‘racist’ ascription won’t be particularly comforting to the Obama supporter.)
That is why, though the McCain campaign has been retreating elsewhere, first from Michigan and last week from Wisconsin, Pennsylvania remains the lone blue state where it’s still attacking—chiefly through Palin, whose racist anti-Obama pitch has been exciting and inciting the knuckle-draggers everywhere. And it’s why Pennsylvania is the only blue state to which Obama is still committing a considerable portion of his (admittedly, huge) resources.
To sum up: with 16 days to go, Obama seems headed for a clear, though not a landslide, victory. But he’s going to have to hold Pennsylvania. And while by the polls he would appear to have a comfortable, double-digit cushion there, who knows the full extent of the evil that lurks, still, in the heart of Appalachia?