McCain and Palin and the uphill struggle

My latest column for the FT notices the role inversion apparent in the race so far.

Mr McCain finds himself in a curious position. He entered the race as an experienced and well-known candidate, much-liked, with years in the Senate behind him. He was running against a virtually unknown novice, with barely any legislative achievements to boast of - and a black man with a funny name, to boot. Mr McCain was the known quantity, the safer choice, literally the elder statesman and Mr Obama had everything to prove. Yet with four weeks to go, the election is being run by both sides as though the opposite were true.

Read on here. (Noting the illustration, a friend asks, how come they've got paddles?)

Comments

zic October 8, 2008 10:18 AM

In this subtle way, the unpopularity of the Bush administration undercut Mr McCain’s advantage in seniority. It is not so much that Mr McCain is branded with the record of the Bush administration. The Obama campaign’s constant charge that McCain is McSame seems to me to have mostly fallen flat. The problem is that in both opposing Mr Obama and putting distance between himself and President Bush, Mr McCain became an unknown quantity and hence a risk.

The abruptly worsening economic crisis had a reinforcing effect. It pushed the burden of explanation away from the Democratic contender, whose anti-market talking-points blend easily with the popular mood, and towards the Republican, now obliged to clarify his support for deregulation and other dubious doctrines. Never very convincing on economic issues, this is something Mr McCain has struggled to do.

These two grafs staddle both sides of the debate. In the first, you lay out the best description of McCain in voters minds as the unknown. It's the danger of running as a maverick.

The second, though I disagree with the framing, is the issue. To borrow from the Clintons, it's the economy, stupid. Frame it anti-market or anti-regulation, for the average voter it feels like market greed that failed to trickle down and that's now costing the little guy.

It's the place where conservatives have some serious soul searching to do, isn't it? But I'm with Buffet on this one, if it's too complicated to understand, it's probably not a good investment. If conservatives wanted to avoid blanket regulation, they should have looked at the need for bubble regulation when it became obvious a few years ago. That was a free-market failure of massive proportions.

If it cost McCain this election, at least one good thing will have come out of it.

Tim October 8, 2008 12:30 PM

And if you read the Rolling Stone article on McCain (or if you have a halfway decent bullshit detector and have actually listened to McCain) you can easily see why this is the case.