When the story of this election gets written, expect to read a lot about how the financial-system implosion gave Obama an unexpected post-GOP-convention boost that turned the dynamic decisively. And of course to an extent that’s undeniable. But this analysis implies that the candidates are mere victims of events. Big Things Happened and there was nothing John McCain could do to recover.
But why, exactly, has it been that the Wall Street meltdown has proved so lethal to McCain’s electoral prospects? Pundits now blithely say that “Democrats are traditionally the party voters turn to on pocketbook issues.” This claim may draw evidence from certain poll questions, but in the history of the past few decades you find the most successful Republican president (Reagan) credited with resurrecting a moribund economy, and you find voters often turning to the GOP as the party that could keep American business humming. So it’s not as though McCain had nothing to work with.
I think that the picture of McCain as victim of Wall Street chaos disintegrates on close examination. The financial situation has hurt him the way virtually every significant event or crisis of the campaign has: it has shown how improvisational, seat-of-the-pants and ultimately unsteady his style of leadership is (which is why his “steady hand on the tiller” rhetoric fails to connect).
Opportunity favors the prepared. And the rich irony of this election has been that, “green behind the ears” though he may appear to be, it is Obama, the rookie, who has been showing us what “prepared” really looks like.
He has run a methodical, strategically intelligent, eyes-on-the-prize campaign from the start to near the finish. He has not allowed poll-dips or transitory squalls to knock him off course. He has applied creative and energetic attention equally to ground organization and Web activism. These are qualities we’re all going to want to see in a national leader as we try to pick up the pieces of the country from the Bush-era wtreckage.
When the markets began breaking down, yes, Obama kept talking about the middle class and the failed GOP policies of deregulation. But he’d been talking about them for a year-and-a-half already. He didn’t have to declare a bogus suspension of his campaign to show how he “got it.”
If the financial crisis has pushed Obama into a firm lead, it is not because events somehow distracted voters from other negatives about the candidate. Rather, the crisis offered a decisive illustration of what kind of president he’s likely to be — and a contrast with what we might get from the other guy.
All of which is reassuring, at a time when we could all use some reassurance. As it turns out, for all the imagery we’ve seen of Obama as the second coming of JFK, it’s looking, depressingly, like we’re going to need him to be FDR instead.
(This email over at TPM expresses a similar view of McCain’s self-inflicted troubles.)
Post Revisions:
- December 12, 2008 @ 10:42:56 [Current Revision] by Scott Rosenberg
- October 8, 2008 @ 07:27:53 by Scott Rosenberg