The last week of the presidential campaign has been so incoherent that there’s no point trying to craft a coherent post about it. Instead I’m just going to muddle through with some observations:
- Right in the middle of the debate, just as Lehrer was popping the Iran question, I got up to take a leak and get a beer. As I was walking back I could hear the sound but not see the teevee and I thought it had gone to a truck commercial, it was actually just McCain talking. That was the only time all night I thought he would win the election. He’s too manly and sonorous not to be President.
- We’re probably going to have to wait for a post election memoir or confessional op-ed before we know the real thinking behind McCain’s campaign “suspension” this week but did they honestly think they could swoop into D.C., claim credit for solving the financial crisis and get the debate postponed (so as to bump Biden/Palin indefinitely) in one fell swoop? I can see the attraction of that scenario from their point of view but the chances of it working were awful. For starters Obama would have had to play along in order for it to work and why on Earth would he do that? As soon as the Blues confirmed that Obama was going to Mississippi McCain was screwed.
- The interactive format of the debate greatly helped Obama. Neither Gore nor Kerry could directly respond to Bush when he’d go off on his crazy tangents talking about scary but meaningless bullshit. McCain did it too, but the fact that Obama could challenge him directly (even if it just meant interjecting “John, that’s not true.”) reduced a lot of its power.
- My little sister made an excellent observation about Sarah Palin. If her life is a Disney movie the week leading up to her debate with Joe Biden would be the “study montage”; nothing but her using flash cards to learn about intractable international conflicts, repeatedly (and hilariously) trying to pronounce the names of foreign leaders and memorizing NATO’s membership list with a catchy mnemonic. (A Hilary Duff, Miley Cyrus or “High School Musical” song is all but mandatory.) Then she’ll stroll into the debate on Thursday and crush stodgy old Senator Joe.
- Even discounting my own pro-Blue bias it’s hard to think that the debate was anything but a net plus for Obama. (Polling will tell us for sure in the next few days.) I don’t think he performed better than McCain but having the “foreign policy” debate get half eaten by the same financial crisis that ate McCain’s poll numbers was helpful. Even on the questions that were supposed to be McCain’s turf Obama held his own. Both guys brought their A-game but two weeks from now nothing from this debate is going to be remembered. McCain needed something to shake up the campaign and he didn’t get it. For someone who supposedly doesn’t understand the distinction between tactics and strategy Obama got the strategic win.
- Sarah Palin’s interview with Katie Couric was a disaster mitigated only by the fact that the financial hullabaloo drew away most of the attention. (The fact that awkward and embarrassing moments kept dribbling out for three days didn’t help either.) A Palin withdrawal is now being talked about on the right and the left. McCain can’t pull her though, nor can she “voluntarily” withdraw, it would mean conceding the election. McCain’s whole pitch is that he’s got enough wisdom and experience to have good Presidential Judgment with a capital P and J. If he admits, tacitly or explicitly, that his vice-president pick was a mistake that argument is exploded.
- Then, of course, there’s the issue of dealing with an all but certain revolt amongst the fundamentalists. Short of replacing her with the verifiable second coming of Jesus they’re going to be right pissed. He won’t pull the rug from her unless he’s convinced he’s going to lose anyway, in which case any anything which could shake up the campaign is a good thing. Which brings me to my final observation:
- The . . . uh . . . “erratic” behavior of the McCain campaign in the last two weeks has only two possible explanations. Either McCain and his brain trust are simply unable to handle the wild vicissitudes and intense scrutiny of the presidential level of politics or they see themselves as being terribly behind and view radical campaign shifts as their only hope. There are no other plausible explanations for what they’ve been doing.
