Politico’s Politics

Charles Krauthammer was just asked by Brit Hume, “could McCain have done anything to win” and the response was “no.” Well, Krauthammer is brilliant, but of course thats not right. McCain could have easily said something like this, “Senator, you have been not truthful on issue after issue and that is why issues about who you associate with matter. You have failed to be truthful on my plan for healthcare, on your plan for taxes, on your votes to not give medical care to children born as a result of botched abortion, on your relationship with Pastor Wright and whether or not you knew over the course of 20 years just how much your Reverend hates America, on your relationship with an unrepentant terrorist. These failures to be honest matter because people need to be able to trust you, and they cannot trust you when you fail to tell them the truth.” (Please note: I am not saying that all of these charges are per say valid – that is of course up for debate – but McCain could have made that argument.) Had McCain done this at the very start, this would have been a bomb thrown into the middle of the debate from the first minute, changing its dynamics to favor McCain. If this had failed, McCain could have repeated the same argument about Wright and Ayers and botched abortions, etc., while making a case for his (McCain’s) plans to help the middle class, and then again, on issue of judgment, and then again, on another issue, and another issue, until Obama was forced to reply, and then the issue of Obama’s associations, and people’s questions about Obama and who he is, would have been open and would have become the centerpiece of the campaign for McCain to pound on during the last 20 days. Again, politically speaking, these questions matter not because the people that Obama has associated with are bad people, but because Obama is a virtual unknown, and for voters, they are relevant issues. McCain failed to do that, and had he been successful, he would have come out of the debate with a powerful win.

Had he not wanted to bring these associations up, McCain could have still been clearer about his attacks on Obama. McCain failed to respond to Obama’s charges on his healthcare plan (which I think is a pretty terrible plan, electorally speaking); he failed to respond to Obama’s claim that he will cut taxes for 95% of all Americans (because 95% of all Americans do not actually pay federal taxes, and its hard to cut taxes for people who do not pay any – only ~60% of all Americans pay an income tax); he failed to explain why Obama’s vote on abortion legislation is problematic; he failed to respond to Obama’s charge that his and Bush’s economic policies are the same (the comment that came right after McCain’s most powerful line about not being George Bush), and so on. Note that in many polls, Obama is either tied or ahead of McCain on the issue of taxes, and a very large share of voters, if not a majority, think that it is McCain who will “raise” taxes, and not Obama. It is very hard to see how a Republican can win when people perceive the Democratic candidate as being more pro-low taxes than the Republican. Plenty of Democrats have run arguing that they will cut taxes, or that they will not raise them, but Republicans generally succeed in painting them as still being for tax hikes. McCain has failed to do that with Obama so far in this campaign, and he has suffered at the polls in part because of this issue.

So no question, McCain had some good moments – Joe the plumber, “I am not George Bush”, Senator Government, just to mention three. But Obama debates very well, and he has a great way of coming off as cool, and of answering questions in a way that either makes the attacker look bad (even though the attack was completely fair in his attacks) or simply ignores the charge and says something else. Obama did that with Clinton throughout the primaries, and only when Mrs Clinton learned how to really go after him and get under his skin did she start being successful in her charges against Obama.

And so the debate was at best a draw. Bill Kristol made a good point tonight (as did Sen Clinton on Fox) that at the end of this debate, a voter could see the message that Obama has for why he should be President, yet that same voter probably could not see that from McCain. He failed, in this debate and in previous ones, to explain why McCain should be President. And for this reason, McCain is failing to make a compelling case for himself inre this election. Yes, the economic circumstance is bad, and electoral dynamics favor the Democrats. But Obama is a very weak candidate (indeed, his recent rise in the polls still shows how weak of a candidate he is, because when an economy has collapsed, a challenger should be above 47-48%) and a strong Republican campaign could beat him, both through a negative attack and a positive message for his candidacy. The McCain campaign has so far failed to provide such a campaign since about a week after the GOP convention ended. It was doing just that in August, and the selection of Palin was the peak of a good month. Yet since then, they have really dropped the ball.