Polls showing John McCain tied or even ahead of Barack Obama are stirring angst and second-guessing among some of the Democratic Party’s most experienced operatives, who worry that Obama squandered opportunities over the summer and may still be underestimating his challenges this fall. “It’s more than an increased anxiety,” said Doug Schoen, who worked as one of Bill Clinton’s lead pollsters during his 1996 reelection and has worked for both Democrats and independents in recent years. “It’s a palpable frustration. Deep-seated unease in the sense that the message has gotten away from them.” … A major Democratic fundraiser described it a good bit more starkly after digesting the polls of recent days: “I’m so depressed. It’s happening again. It’s a nightmare.” Adding to Democratic restlessness, McCain has largely neutralized some issue advantages that have long favored Democrats. This week’s USA Today/Gallup poll reported a split on which candidate “can better handle the economy”; 48 percent chose Obama while 45 percent said McCain. In late August, Obama had a 16-point edge on the issue. Also this week, an ABC News/Washington Post poll reported that when voters are asked “who can bring about needed change to Washington,” McCain still trails Obama by 12 points. But in June, McCain trailed by 32 points. That shift in the public’s perception of the issues, in Democratic pollster Celinda Lake’s words, “tremendously concerns me.” Lake joined other Democratic veterans, some speaking not for attribution, in emphasizing a classic liberal woe: that the Democrat let the Republican define him. “Obama needed to define himself,” Lake said. “I do think that during the Democratic convention we should have done a better job of defining McCain.”
It’s funny how meaningless little phrases posing as ideas sneak into the public mind. The idea that so-and-so “defined” thus-and-such, and thereby won an election, is a formulation much beloved of political commentators and media gurus. Has it any roots in reality?
Senator Obama’s problem isn’t that some GOP-Fox-Limbaugh media conspiracy has “defined him.” Asked to identify the great challenge facing a politician, Harold Macmillan famously answered: “Events, dear boy, events.” Events have not been in Senator Obama’s favor. Like practically all Democrats, he has run a campaign whose success is predicated on America’s failure — in this case economic failure at home and military failure in Iraq. But events have conspired against Obama’s hope to be borne to the White House on a rising tide of bad news from Iraq. Nobody is going to use the words “Mission Accomplished,” but the surge’s quelling of insurgent violence, coupled with the handover of Anbar to Iraqi authorities, is evidence that the people who called this a “war that can’t be won” were and are wrong.
On the economic front, the dollar is climbing against the euro and gold, oil is down in the $100/barrel range. It seems like only yesterday the smart guys were predicting that oil would be at $300/barrel. In fact, it was the day before yesterday.
The media is still in Chicken Little mode, and you’d think it was Calcutta 1944 out there. But that will change, too: The media will try to distort positive developments, but they cannot completely ignore them.
Obama’s campaign, and the media narrative that sustains it, is based on two related ideas: 1. that everything George W. Bush has ever done is catastrophic, especially, but not limited to, Iraq; 2. John McCain represents the continuation of the Bush approach. But McCain, for better or for worse (for better and for worse, really) isn’t a Bush guy, and Obama’s best cudgel, the war, is a less effective political weapon today than it was six months ago. Bush isn’t going to get back up to 70 percent approval ratings, but as the war goes, so goes Bush’s reputation. But the Democrats are still running against Bush, not against McCain.
It’s not that they failed to “define” McCain, or that the campaign has lost control of the message — it’s that their message is custom-tailored to political realities that are now several months out of date. The media will do all they can to help Obama, but even the worst of them can’t ignore events.
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