Debates lend themselves to role reversals. Candidates who fear the public may think they're too dovish come off as hawkish; tightwads become willing to spend; interventionists sound isolationist, and so it goes.
Sometimes these charades work, up to a point. In 1960, John Kennedy, fearing Richard Nixon would win the cold-war toughness vote, manufactured a "missile gap," claiming that the United States was falling behind the Soviet Union in its attack capacities. There was no missile gap, but Nixon couldn't correct Kennedy for fear of looking dovish and of revealing classified material. Besides, Kennedy was enough of a genuine cold-warrior to pull off the charade.
John McCain tried out two reversals in last night's debate. The first came at the start, when he announced that he'd direct the Secretary of the Treasury to buy up all of America's distressed mortgages and work out better terms for beleaguered homeowners. The second came in response to Barack Obama's donning the raiment of a hawk in his policy towards Pakistan: McCain played, if not the dove, at least the less audibly belligerent candidate by refusing to say America should have an announced policy of crossing the Afghani-Pakistani border if the military conditions are right.
The discreet McCain (and he was calling for discretion more than he was for anti-interventionism) was so at odds with everything McCain has said on the campaign trail this year that Obama had no trouble calling him out, referring to McCain's "Bomb, bomb Iran" disquisition and kindred quotes. Actually, it's Obama's hawkishness on the Afghan-Pakistani war that's the real reversal here, very much in the tradition of Kennedy's missile gap, and it should make liberals nervous. Going after Bin Laden if we have actionable intelligence is no problem, but trying to stabilize Afghanistan, as Obama is proposing, may prove to be the ultimate fool's errand. That's not a question, however, on which last night's debate or this year's election will turn.
The more interesting reversal is McCain's proposal to direct the Treasury secretary to buy up mortgages. The secretary is in fact already authorized to do so in the $700 billion bailout bill signed into law last Friday, but he is not directed to do so, and McCain would so direct him. But what's interesting about the proposal is what it didn't do. Despite the fact that it was the only concrete new proposal of the evening from either candidate, it didn't really affect the outcome of the debate, which insta-polls from CBS and CNN showed Obama winning handily, or even the conduct of the debate. Obama merely observed that the bailout allowed the secretary to buy up the mortgages, and McCain didn't really return to his proposal once he unveiled it.
The problem for McCain is that the proposal sits awkwardly in the midst of his generally laissez-faire, deregulatory economics; that it's as uncharacteristic of him as his discretion on matters Pakistani. The larger problem for McCain is that Obama is surging because his narrative on what has happened to the economy is superior to McCain's. Obama's narrative begins with the fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans were left out of the Wall Street boom of the past half-decade, a detail that Republicans tend to omit from their story of what went wrong because they didn't notice it at the time. Obama's is a partisan narrative as McCain's and the Republicans' cannot be. Obama was particularly good last night at connecting the crisis to the challenges ordinary people are confronting, and while McCain has demonstrated more aptitude for this than George H.W. Bush did during the '92 election, he still wins no prizes for empathy.
Obama, on the other hand, seems to have studied and learned from the victor of '92, Bill Clinton. He's learned that if you can convey an understanding of how a bad economy impacts good people, they'll believe you're in their corner, even if you don't have great ideas for how to turn the economy around. At the moment, it's clear, nobody has any certitude about how to turn the economy around in the short-term – that is, what the magic formula is for unfreezing the credit markets and keeping scads of banks from going down. But Obama's proposals for longterm fixes – his tax, energy, health care and education programs – are not only plausible but convey a sense of economic fairness that McCain's proposals lack.
Some Obama skeptics note that he's not run that brilliant a campaign; that's he's only ahead because of the economic travails. But so it is for Democrats. Clinton was only elected because of the economic travails of 1992. Hell, Roosevelt was only elected because of the economic travails of 1932. Democrats tend to be elected when the economy is in distress because their narratives on the economy are told from a viewpoint with which millions of people identify. The singular Republican progressive proposal on the economy cannot turn this around -- certainly not after they've identified themselves for decades with economic ideas and policies that have benefited the rich and nobody else. The failure of McCain's debate-night proposal to resonate more, even for the duration of the debate, illustrates the depth of his, and his party's, problem. When the economy is this bad, one thing Americans tend not to want is more Republican rule.
