No One’s Finished Yet
Dan and Dave Weigel seem to have read too much into my post on those New Hampshire poll results, but that is partly my fault when I put the word doom in the title. I don’t know whether Wright has fatally wounded Obama, and after many repeated, spectacular wrong calls in this election (remember the famous Thompson v. Clinton showdown?) I really try to stay out of the prediction business these days. It strikes me as significant that there has been a 23-point swing against Obama in two months in a state that is considered to be Democratic-leaning. I didn’t mean to say by this that Obama is necessarily ”finished,” but New Hampshire does offer a case where Obama should have most of the advantages and has lost ground to someone who represents the continuation of all the things that most people in New Hampshire oppose. If we want to see how a McCain victory could happen, New Hampshire’s polling movement may be instructive.
Then again, I am probably more easily persuaded than most that Obama has suffered irreparable damage, since I already assumed him to be a weak general election candidate. Back at the height of the enthusiasm for Obama, I brazenly declared that the Democrats had marched themselves off a cliff, but at the time I was thinking of Obama’s problems mostly in terms of the more conventional baggage of being inexperienced and far to the left. A week before that, I had already made what was probably one of the first Obama-as-McGovern ‘72 arguments, and I was assuming this to be the case well before Wright exploded onto the national scene, to say nothing of the San Francisco “cling” remarks.
All that said, there is no way to know whether campaigns are finished in this cycle–I assumed McCain’s was finished months ago, and that was very wrong. After Obama had won all of the contests after February 5, everyone assumed that Clinton was on the verge of elimination, but she keeps going. Three months ago, people were talking as if Obama could transmute lead into gold, and perhaps in another three months things will have changed around completely and the structual advantages for the Democrats will take over and give them a huge lead. One reason I am skeptical of this is that challengers, which has typically meant Democratic candidates in the last 30 years, usually poll strongly early on and then keep losing ground. There is always a convention bounce, but the challenger typically suffers an overall loss of support as the campaign grinds on. The ‘08 cycle has not reliably followed previous patterns because of the changes in the primary calendar and the sheer length of the campaign, so none of that may matter, but we have no reason to think that the Democratic nominee will substantially gain lasting support in the remaining months of the campaign.
Filed under: politics
“The ‘08 cycle has not reliably followed previous patterns because of the changes in the primary calendar and the sheer length of the campaign, so none of that may matter, but we have no reason to think that the Democratic nominee will substantially gain lasting support in the remaining months of the campaign. ”
Indeed, far from every place he visits becoming “Obama Country” the antipathy and distrust grows and grows. Now, McCain could have another one of his moments and spout off, in a debate with Obama, that endless war is good for the national character or whatever, but his campaign staff seems to have done a fairly good job of keeping him on a leash so far.
Just one note: Obama DID transmute lead into gold. A black newcomer came out of nowhere and has virtually taken away the Democratic nomination from the strongest front-runner for the nomination since, well, just about ever. He did so on his own virtues, rather than preying upon her weaknesses.
Now, the notion that he can’t do this again, faced with the current difficulties of his campaign, seems premature and wishful thinking by those who underestimated him the first time around, such as yourself. It’s obviously a difficult poitical task, but he’s shown himself capable of surrmounting huge and difficult obstacles before, so it’s far from “over”. In fact, the same virtues that got him this far are still there. And his opponent in the fall has huge weaknesses as well. So it wouldn’t surprise me if all these prognostications prove embarrassingly wrong in the fall. Certainly, the notion of a McGovern-style 60/40 blowout seems absurd.
As for Democrats “usually” polling strong early and losing late, the last young, well-spoken Democrat with lots of charisma to win the White House, Bill Clinton in 1992 (who is the candidate most like Obama, not McGovern), was losing horribly in the polls all the way through the spring and summer. In fact, he was doing so badly he was actually third in the three-way race with Perot for a long stretch. It wasn’t until the post-convention surge that he took lead in the national polls, as voters realized they really did want a young, positive, charismatic change candidate. (All of which Obama is, while McGovern was only offering “change”, with a negative, uncharismatic, dog-eared variety.)
Well, that and the fact that that front-runner’s campaign was a monument to incompetence and the Dems’ primary system a quirky, largely caucus-driven affair that favored frenetic activism over traditional machine politics. Oh, and two crucial states where he would almost certainly have lost were stripped of their delegates, and his opponent was a short, shrill, unattractive woman who was panned as a bitch every time she tried to play tough. I know the Republicans are broke, dispirited, and politically in the wrong, but there are many ways in which McCain is going to be a considerably more challenging opponent than Clinton was.