During one of his more lucid moments, World Chess Champion Bobby Fischer observed, “People have been playing below strength against me for years.” It’s a shrewd statement that repays parsing; it essentially poses the question, Were Fischer’s best opponents playing, as their defenders alleged, at a lower than usual level when they lost to him, or was it instead that the intrinsic weaknesses in their technique were invisible until a genius of Fischer’s caliber came along to expose them?
A similar question is worth pondering now, three weeks before the presidential election...
With a McCain loss apparently in sight, many Republicans are trying to argue that the coming loss isn’t exactly a loss, or rather doesn’t constitute a complete repudiation. Some of them, beginning with right-wing gadfly Patrick Buchanan, have taken to arguing that McCain was actually winning the election until the financial crisis arose. Everything was going fine, in other words, but then lightning struck from an unexpected part of the sky. This notion has no basis in fact. It’s clear enough that the financial crisis, and especially McCain’s hapless response to it, widened Obama’s lead. Financial crises always hurt the party in power, especially when the party in power is Republican. But McCain’s putative lead is a myth. He had been running behind, albeit closely, all year, and then, in the immediate aftermath of the Republican convention and the absurd hoopla surrounding his selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate, he experienced a traditional post-convention bounce. It was a bounce that put him, for about a week, a statistically meaningless one or two points ahead in some polls. None of the race’s metrics suggested that lead was going to last. Certainly not when so much of it depended on Sarah Palin, whose appeal was always going to prove chimerical.
Others adduce the ineptitude of McCain’s campaign. The campaign has indeed been inept, and its attacks on Obama unfounded and scattershot. But --- and this goes to Bobby Fischer’s sardonic observation --- we know it was inept largely because it failed so spectacularly. Attacks of precisely the same inanity had been successful in the past, against Michael Dukakas, Al Gore, and John Kerry, and many pundits expected the same result this year. They failed this time only because of the supernal skills of the candidate at whom they’ve been aimed. Obama has demonstrated himself to be the most elegant counter-puncher in American politics. And indeed, recent studies suggest Republican attacks have actually produced an effect diametrically opposite to that intended: They have raised Obama’s favourables and McCain’s unfavourables. They may even force Republicans to reassess their tendency, going back at least to 1988, to campaign in this ruthlessly negative fashion. Lee Atwater is dead, Karl Rove has moved on to greener pastures, and their poisonous contributions to public discourse may now be on the wane.
Two days ago, two great sentimentalists of American political journalism, Tom Brokaw and Chris Matthews, were applauding John McCain for having taken to task a woman at a rally who told the candidate she didn’t trust Obama because “he’s an Arab.” It was, they both averred, a return to form, signaling the re-emergence of the real McCain. But this is pure eyewash. The man has been receiving phone calls and e-mails and text messages, and even public demands, from long-term supporters and political colleagues to stop the harshness; it’s been having a negative effect on his own chances and injuring the prospects of down-ticket candidates. At the same time, his pollsters have been warning him about the electoral blowback. His discomfort at having to contradict the woman, to tone things down, was patent to anyhow who saw the video clip. The truth is, there’s been nothing anomalous about the way McCain has conducted his campaign in recent weeks. Since the spring, he has been unleashing one freshet of character assassination after another, and at the precise moment he was admonishing the woman at his rally, he was running ads suggesting that Obama consorts with terrorists. His Vice Presidential pick has been doing the same thing at every one of her rallies. And he has even promised to raise the question at tonight’s debate, insisting he’s been forced to do so because Obama and Joe Biden questioned his courage.
It’s a risky tack for him, and I wouldn’t be terribly surprised if he desists when the time comes. But he’s in a quandary. If he does desist --- given his own characterization of the challenge --- he will look irresolute. But if he chooses to stick to the script he has written for himself, he will further provoke those voters who have recoiled from his nasty tactics. And once again, it’s a quandary of his own devising.
I mentioned earlier that Palin’s popularity was bound to be chimerical, and I think this was clear even at the height of the post-convention hysteria. The entirety of the enthusiasm for her rested on one perkily delivered speech written not by her, but by McCain’s staff, and not even written specifically for her, although subsequently customized, largely with claims that have since been demonstrated to be false. But she was on a short list of candidates acceptable to the movement conservatives, an evangelical with all the ideological bona fides McCain himself lacked, and she was easily the freshest face in the race, young, attractive, and totally unknown outside of Alaska. She was a good story if not necessarily a good candidate, and since the right wing base needed to believe, believe they did. The rest, though, was just an evanescent PR bubble, a one-week wonder. As soon as she was even minimally exposed to scrutiny (and minimal exposure is all that was allowed) it was clear she couldn’t live up to the hopes vested in her. She was an untested, untraveled, largely unread provincial from an underpopulated, remote state with no experience of national politics and no history of intellectual curiosity or achievement. Her subsequent slippage in popular esteem was inevitable. She now has the highest unfavourables of any of the candidates in the race (more than half of those surveyed regard her as unfit for the presidency).
Which isn’t to suggest her political career is over. The Republican base, so energized by her emergence, has barely noticed that the rest of the country quickly became disillusioned. Nowadays, many hard-core Republican voters attend her joint rallies with McCain and then leave when she has finished and he begins to speak. And although some conservative pundits have shown sufficient principle to voice dismay at her elevation --- she is often cited as the final, decisive reason they have committed apostasy and endorsed Obama, a surprisingly frequent occurrence over the past fortnight --- others proclaim her a great raw political talent, a Harry Truman in utero. She will no doubt spend the next three years being groomed and polished by a large army of professional political handlers. I suspect that by December of 2011, polls will indicate she is the front-runner for the Republican nomination. She won’t be the nominee, though; despite extravagant claims made on her behalf, she is clearly too stupid (a word forbidden by good manners, but absolutely appropriate here, as anyone who has heard her speak extempore knows) to endure the rigours of a primary season. Our system for choosing presidents is imperfect, God knows, but not so imperfect as to permit a Sarah Palin to survive the debates and press conferences and interviews which she will no longer be able to avoid.
The professionals in the Republican party now expect to lose. It is why some of their number are assailing McCain for the ragtag incompetence of his campaign. It is why they are raising entirely meretricious claims of vote-rigging, so that --- pace the polls consistently showing a big Obama lead --- they can claim afterward they were robbed. And it’s especially why Sarah Palin’s camp and her camp followers have begun to leak word of her unhappiness with the way the campaign has been conducted, with its purported gloves-on timorousness. She is distancing herself from the expected loss, many in the party are doing the same, and should Obama win the victory that now seems in the offing, these people all hope to escape blame and be around to pick up the pieces.
