Mark Schmitt explains that McCain’s saintly image was never as solid as he thought:
The week began with the McCain campaign's announcement that now the gloves were really, really coming off. Then Sarah Palin, Fox News, and, to a somewhat lesser extent, McCain himself descended into firing up the base by encouraging their loyalists to believe that Obama was a pal-of-terrorists and perhaps a traitor. McCain’s crazed negativity may not have been the nastiest in recent history — it’s always hard to maintain perspective, or even remember exactly what happened, four or 20 years ago. But it surely violated three basic rules of campaigning devised by Lee Atwater and Karl Rove for Bush per et fils:
And Harold Meyerson writes that, like most candidates who attempt to suddenly change their political image in a debate, McCain failed because his transformation just didn’t seem that plausible:
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.
Robert Kuttner warns that a vacuum of leadership between now and the inauguration of a new president in January could be disastrous:
However, my round of reporting this week suggests that Obama and the congressional leadership are not there yet. The leaders on Capitol Hill are literally exhausted after nearly two weeks of twenty-hour days brokering the Paulson plan, and stunned that their efforts have not borne fruit. The Obama people are looking to January to launch an emergency program rather than November. And to the extent that their eyes are on November, the focus is November 4, not November 5. “First, we have to get him elected,” one senior economic aide told me. Yet, as Obama himself said, in one of his most elegant put-downs of McCain, a president needs to be able to more than one thing at a time.
And Sarah Posner has the latest on the religious right:
Dobson, the unyielding dispenser of advice on how to raise your children misapprehends the world outlook of a whole generation of young people reared by parents under Dobson’s spell. They hate the gays and the baby killers just as much as Dobson does, but they know to tamp down the vitriol. Say you love the environment! Say you’re worried about poverty!
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—The Editors
