AIDES to John McCain are saying that they hope to change the subject from the financial crisis.
Hitting Barack Obama on his association with Bill Ayers, the former Weather Underground terrorist, is the opening feint in this strategy. The press will howl (already, an Associated Press writer has deemed the Ayers attack “racially tinged”), but a relationship with a terrorist is obviously legitimate campaign fodder. While he’s at it, McCain ought to go after Obama’s much closer and more disturbing relationship with the racist and anti-American Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
But it doesn’t matter how many times Sarah Palin rips Obama for consorting with Ayers or if the McCain campaign runs exclusively Ayers and Wright TV ads for the next four weeks – the subject of the campaign will remain resolutely unchanged.
With a falling stock market shedding hundreds of billions of dollars of wealth every other day and with headlines dominated by a financial crisis threatening banks around the world, no one is going to be distracted from the economy for long.
People will focus on their drastically diminished 401(k) and stock statements – and why shouldn’t they? Few things are quite as important to their material well-being.
McCain will have to demonstrate that he understands this during tonight’s debate.
Of course, it wasn’t McCain’s fault that, after he pulled even with Obama, a bunch of toxic collateralized-debt obligations fell on his head. “Life isn’t fair” was McCain’s diagnosis of the politics of the financial mess the other day, and he’s right.
Obama’s leadership during the crisis has consisted of standing out of the way and mouthing platitudes about the failings of the last eight years of Bush economics. His poll numbers are essentially unchanged on his ability to handle the economy.
But all Obama has to do in this environment is not be a Republican. McCain has to meet a higher standard.
Not having a compelling economic message before the financial crisis hit was malpractice; now, it’s madness.
McCain’s pet causes of bipartisanship and earmark reform don’t qualify. Bipartisanship is an empty concept; the parties can unite just as easily to pass foolhardy laws as necessary ones. Meanwhile, only McCain would – as he did in the first debate – steer a discussion about a complex global credit crunch onto earmarked federal spending for bear DNA research.
McCain has suffered from his own manifest lack of interest in economic issues. He was chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee for four years, but you’d never know it. He repeatedly misstates his only real tax proposal for the middle class, an increase in the dependent exemption.
Often, he calls it a “credit.” In the first debate, he called it a “dividend.” He might as well lurch into Tina Fey territory and call it that “hoozie-what’s-it.”
Most voters probably didn’t even know that McCain had a (creative) health-care plan until Obama began lambasting it.
McCain needs more focus on the economy rather than less, and tonight’s debate is the best forum to begin to do it.
He has to brand Obama as a job-killer – whose promised tax hikes, plans for $1 trillion in new spending and protectionism make him unfit to forge the nation’s economic recovery. (Obama has implicitly admitted the harmfulness of his capital-gains-tax hikes by saying he might not impose them if the economy’s still sputtering.)
McCain has to make the case that Obama’s most dangerous association is with a Democratic Congress that will take Obama’s proposals for tax and spending increases and make them much worse.
In a speech yesterday in Albuqurque, N.M., McCain aimed in the right direction, asking “Who is the real Obama?” in the context of Obama’s misrepresentations of his own economic policies. He hit Obama and “his Democratic allies in Congress” over Fannie and Freddie.
If McCain fails to stay intensely engaged on the economy, the race might take on the cast of the 1992 campaign. That year, amidst economic discontent, George H.W. Bush ran against Bill Clinton on character and experience. Clinton pledged to fix the economy. Bush had little or nothing to offer the middle class, while Clinton (like Obama this year) promised those voters a tax cut.
So, by all means, McCain should highlight Obama’s troubling friendships – but he has to be careful. If it’s the candidate of “change” versus the candidate of “change the subject,” he’ll lose in an electoral landslide.
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