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Some folks have talked about the way in which McCain has seemed to enter these debates determined to win the reviews of pundits, and in doing lost his focus on actual voters. But Yglesias makes the critique a bit more concrete:
For example, [McCain] alluded at one point to a desire to allow more imports of sugar ethanol. Now if you’re familiar with the details of the ethanol debate, you’ll know that McCain’s stance on this is correct on the merits. And you’ll also know that Obama is a big support of corn ethanol both because they grow corn in downstate Illinois and because they made a big push for the Iowa Caucuses. McCain, by contrast, has a long and principled record on corn ethanol that’s hurt him in Iowa. This isn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it is a nice illustration of some of McCain’s key campaign themes. And yet he didn’t try to explain it at all. Similarly, he’s had a knack for besting Obama on national security issues nobody cares about, like the relationship of US-Colombia trade deals to the US-Venezuela proxy conflict playing out in the Colombian jungle. People figure that Obama seems like a smart guy, and if something important happens involving a guerilla group nobody’s heard of fighting a president nobody’s heard of in a country nobody cares about, that Obama’s up to the task of coming up with a good idea — meanwhile, McCain has no education policy.That accounts for the voters. But I'd add that part of what's led McCain awry is that elites are, in certain crucial ways, behind the voters. I tend to watch these debates in a room filled with politically involved liberals, and most all of them anxiously cringe every time McCain goes on the attack. Liberals are scarred. They remember all too well the elections they've lost because they were attacked as untrustworthy on national security, profligate with federal dollars, punitive with taxes. So they hear McCain put his Greatest Hits collection on the phonograph and they recoil, sure that those golden oldies will work. But voters aren't tuning into the 1988 debate. They see Wall Street falling apart and bridges falling down and employer-based health care dissolving and can't figure out why McCain keeps talking about earmarks, or why they should care who will cut taxes a little bit more. Taxes aren't their biggest problem anymore. Reagan succeeded. Taxes aren't even in the Top 5. But health care is. Education is. And when the conversation turns to those subjects, McCain stumbles and tap dances.Perhaps the oddest exchange of last night's debate was the back-and-forth over "spreading the wealth." This was another holdover from Obama's now famous exchange with Joe the Plumber (who, as it turns out, isn't even registered to vote). Asked why he was concentrating his tax cuts down the income ladder, he said, "If you've got a plumbing business, you're going to be better off it you've got a whole bunch of customers who can afford to hire you, and right now I think everybody's so pinched that business is bad for everybody and I think when you spread the wealth around, it's good for everybody. " McCain saw an opening: Again and again, he promised Joe the Plumber that unlike Barack Obama, he wouldn't take Joe's wealth. He'd leave it with Joe. But the rest of the country has been living amidst the sharpest inequality since the 1920s. Median wages have stagnated for a decade while the rich have reached almost supernatural heights of opulence. For most folks, spreading the wealth around probably seems like a good idea. It probably seems like the fair thing to do, particularly as we now see that much of that wealth was built off risky trading strategies that have now dealt a gut punch to the broader economy, and thus the pensions and incomes of the rest of us. In the most unequal economy in modern times, McCain had just declared himself pro-hoarding. But pundits only know what they've seen. And they've seen these attacks work. And so the debate finishes, and the red lights beneath the cameras blink back to life, and they go with the safe bet: Today will be like yesterday. But today is not like yesterday. And that's why John McCain is losing.Also: Kleins think alike.
