With less than three weeks remaining in the election, John McCain isn’t quite political toast yet, but he’s under the broiler, there’s smoke around his edges and people are beginning to arrange the butter and jam.
McCain had his best debate performance of the election last night, and arguably might have won it. But that may be a bit like this year’s final tournament of the Fed Ex Cup golf playoffs. Vijay Singh had built such a lead by the time the final post-season tournament came around, all he had to do was complete it alive to win the $10 million Cup prize. Obama emerged from the debate on the defensive, with some bruises, but very much alive. That may be all he needed to do.
The daily national polls the media loves to tout are meaningless. To understand the condition of the presidential race, you have to look at the contest state by state. Right now, it looks very blue.
According to Real Clear Politics, Barack Obama has a clear lead in states with 249 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win. He has a lead in states with another 37 electoral votes. John McCain has a solid lead in states with only 140 electoral votes, and a lead in states with 18 electoral votes. Six states with 94 electorate votes between them are considered a toss up, but Obama is leading in four of them.
For McCain to eke out a win, he would have to win every toss up state, and most of those that now lean toward Obama. That seems highly unlikely at this point.
Sensing gangrene starting to set in on Republican chances to hold onto the White House, some conservative commentators have taken to savaging McCain’s staff of advisors. William Kristol called on McCain to fire his entire campaign team and start from scratch. “It’s really become a pathetic campaign. There’s no strategy. They’re flailing around. They do things that don’t work and keep on doing them. They’re out of sync with their own candidate now.”
It’s true that the McCain campaign has had its share of organizational difficulties. When a former Reagan advance expert told the McCain team their advance operation wasn’t up to stuff, they blew him off. A few days later the campaign lost the luggage of the entire traveling press corps.
But the biggest problems with the McCain campaign are not with the staff, they are with the candidate. John McCain is undisciplined, erratic and seems to prefer to be in difficult situations of his own making. Given the choice of sticking to a script and hammering home a message, he’s liable to throw the notes away and say about anything that happens to come to his mind. Every day is a new message. As if he suffers from ADHD, McCain seems fidgety, incapable of developing a consistent theme.
His campaign is spending tens of millions of dollars on commercials telling voters that Barack Obama’s inexperience is scary in a dangerous world and he is not ready to lead. When one of his own volunteers tells McCain at a rally that she is afraid of Obama, McCain grabs the microphone and tells her that his opponent is a nice guy and she doesn’t have to be afraid of him.
Now that is a good strategy. You’re running against a guy who is the chosen one of his party, there are a lot more people in his party than yours, the incumbent president from your party is the most unpopular in the history of the nation, the economy is tanking on your president’s watch, the country is clamoring for change, and your message is that your opponent is actually a nice guy you don’t have to fear? Yeah, that’s the ticket.
All that being said, John McCain now seems to be in a position where he is most emotionally comfortable. He’s the underdog that nobody thinks can win. Maybe he’s so comfortable in this position of scorned candidate fighting long odds because of what he went through in Hanoi. Who knows?
I believe that we’re going to get the best of John McCain on the campaign trail over the next 20 days. We started to see that last night. He still has enough time, barely, to bring voters back to his side. But he’s going to have to consistently hammer Obama as a risky candidate in dangerous economic and international times. Even then it may be too late. But at least we’ll see if he has the discipline to make a race of it.
If he doesn’t, he’ll find himself traveling the same speech and dinner circuit as Bob Dole, another GOP Senator who got trounced by voters but remained immensely popular inside the beltway.
Most people know that I am helping to manage the Yes on Proposition 8 campaign. Whatever you may think of the issue, I made my most important contribution to the marriage debate last Saturday. I walked my eldest daughter, Samantha, down the aisle to give herself in marriage to the young man she fell in love with in college, five years ago. What a series of emotions. It’s highly personal, but you can read the toast I gave at the reception by clicking here.