Posted by
ClearCommentary.com on Saturday, October 11, 2008 5:03:31 PM
Returning to
Colorado after a two-thousand mile pilgrimage through the prairie
states and across America's heartland, it appears as though the
electoral momentum is redounding to Barack Obama. But, that's the
conventional wisdom, gleaned from newspapers and mainstream television
reporting which are force-fed a diet rich in polling data designed to
reinforce the seeming inevitability of an Obama victory.
However, before we offer our analysis, we'll let Patrick Buchanan
weigh in with a balanced and insightful analysis that hits the
electoral high and low notes just right, underscoring the opportunities
and pitfalls that await McCain.
Deeply embedded in
virtually every editorial, newspaper article or television report we glimpsed were
bleak prognostications and sorrowful lamentations concerning our
financial markets, which are invariably larded with an anecdotal
storyline calculated to wed the entire debacle to the Bush presidency,
which is ineluctably tied to Senator John McCain. Indeed, the somber
tone of every radio announcer or television anchor or article is one of
purposeful resignation, and it's only Obama's studied timidity on the
subject that gives us any hope for a McCain victory next month. He's
convinced he can coast to victory and that is McCain's best hope to
turn this around.
But,
therein lies the quandary: With the political walls crumbling all
around him and the enemy at the gate, anyone else would be at daggers
drawn, understanding that his electoral lifeblood is slowly being
drained--except for McCain, whose lack of urgency either belies a
deeper and more aggressive strategy that he has yet to unleash or
betrays an astonishing lack of understanding of the political
battlefield.
Indeed,
in every city or town we visited, from the quiet hamlets in south-west
Minnesota to Rapid City to the frontier town of Cheyenne and across
Nebraska, the talk from regular Republicans in restaurants and on the
editorial pages was bewilderment at McCain's stunning indifference to
the grim fact that we're in the eleventh hour of his campaign and
rather than doffing his gloves he's wearing a smoking jacket, nodding
out in his corner.
It's
all the more astounding because Obama's candidacy is such a target-rich
environment, which is to say it would be nearly impossible to find a
more liberal Democrat, barring even a clone of George McGovern. We've
heard endless stories about Bush fatigue, the economy, and the war, but
that dwarfs when compared with a political strategy that begins by
listing Obama's top ten liberal positions.
In
a coordinated attack with the RNC, McCain should compile such a list
and hammer each of them in a national campaign that forces them into
the evening news cycle and onto the front pages of mainstream papers,
each time succinctly concluding that Obama is just too extreme, whether
it's on foreign policy, taxes, abortion, or guns, and linking them all
to his associations with extremists from Reverend Wright to William
Ayers.
It's all
there, just waiting for McCain to exploit. In twenty-four days we'll
either be waking up to the prospect of four years of President Obama or
President McCain. If the thought of higher taxes and lower security
makes you cringe, do everything you can in the interim to make the case
to McCain directly and in letters to the editor, that this is still winnable, that it matters, and that there
is a crucial difference between the ad hominen attacks he correctly
eschews and highlighting character flaws and chronic lapses in
judgment, which are completely legitimate, and which he has failed to
exploit.