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Kevin Drum writes:
McCain and Palin are running on fumes. There's just nothing left for them to talk about aside from unpatriotic liberals, sneering urbanites, and how the mainstream media hates them. The politics of esthetics is all they have left.It has truly been a remarkable campaign. If you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose between John McCain and George Bush as president, I don't know who I'd pick — and that's something that would have been inconceivable as recently as a year ago. I wonder if McCain has any idea just how thoroughly he's going to exit this campaign with his reputation permanently soiled and his life story in tatters?It's a good question. But on some level, it's not all McCain's fault. The template is broken. One striking lesson of the campaign has been the reduced salience of the culture war stuff. Rove and Bush could gesture towards identity politics. They could hide behind issues like abortion and guns and the role of the church. McCain has had to state it all explicitly. He's had to talk to the media about media bias and have Palin inform small town voters that they should feel insulted and run ads about drawing a cross in the dirt. I don't know if McCain is jut bad at this stuff or the electorate has undergone some sort of sea change, but a style of politics that was one symbolic and subtle has become explicit and blunt. And its not proving very effective.Similarly, attacks that should have shuttered Obama's campaign did not. In 1988, the Willie Horton ads managed to make Michael Dukakis seem too black. In 2008, Reverend Wright couldn't derail Obama. Indeed, to assert Obama's otherness, they've need to stack racial attacks atop insinuations of Muslim heritage atop cries of political radicalism. In 1984, Ayers would have been enough. In 1988, Wright would have been enough. In 2004, his Arab name would have been enough. In 2008, it seems likely that all three combined won't keep Obama from the White House. Which suggests that the traditional sore spots of American politics are becoming quite a bit duller.
