O Ye Of Little Faith
Kristol at NYT sees McCain “on course to lose” but offers some sound, if radical “surge” advice that he notes McCain already has intuited and acted on, but needs to fully exploit. Excerpts kick off the roundup:
He has a chance. But only if he overrules those of his aides who are trapped by conventional wisdom, huddled in a defensive crouch and overcome by ideological timidity.
The conventional wisdom is that it was a mistake for McCain to go back to Washington last week to engage in the attempt to craft the financial rescue legislation … As one McCain adviser told The Washington Post, “you’ve got to get it [the financial crisis] over with and start having a normal campaign.”
Wrong.
McCain’s impetuous decision to return to Washington was right. The agreement announced early Sunday morning is better … Assuming the legislation passes soon, and assuming it reassures financial markets, McCain will be able to take some credit.
But the goal shouldn’t be to return to “a normal campaign.” For these aren’t normal times.
We face a real financial crisis. Usually the candidate of the incumbent’s party minimizes the severity of the nation’s problems. McCain should break the mold and acknowledge, even emphasize the crisis. He can explain that dealing with it requires candor and leadership of the sort he’s shown in his career. McCain can tell voters we’re almost certainly in a recession, and things will likely get worse before they get better
And McCain can note that the financial crisis isn’t going to be solved by any one piece of legislation. There are serious economists, for example, who think we could be on the verge of a huge bank run. Congress may have to act to authorize the F.D.I.C. to provide far greater deposit insurance, and the secretary of the Treasury to protect money market funds. McCain can call for Congress to stand ready to pass such legislation. He can say more generally that in the tough times ahead, we’ll need a tough president willing to make tough decisions.
With respect to his campaign, McCain needs to liberate his running mate from the former Bush aides brought in to handle her …
I’m told McCain recently expressed unhappiness with his staff’s handling of Palin. On Sunday he dispatched his top aides Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis to join Palin in Philadelphia. They’re supposed to liberate Palin to go on the offensive as a combative conservative in the vice-presidential debate on Thursday.
… Palin has to dispatch quickly any queries about herself, and confidently assert that of course she’s qualified to be vice president. She should spend her time making the case for McCain and, more important, the case against Obama. As one shrewd McCain supporter told me, “Every minute she spends not telling the American people something that makes them less well disposed to Obama is a minute wasted.”
The core case against Obama is pretty simple: he’s too liberal …
… the fact is the only Democrats to win the presidency in the past 40 years — Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton — distanced themselves from liberal orthodoxy. Obama is, by contrast, a garden-variety liberal. He also has radical associates in his past.
…
The McCain campaign might consider responding by calling attention to Chapter 14 of Obama’s eloquent memoir, “Dreams From My Father.” There Obama quotes from the brochure of Reverend Wright’s church — a passage entitled “A Disavowal of the Pursuit of Middleclassness.”
So when Biden goes on about the middle class on Thursday, Palin might ask Biden when Obama flip-flopped on Middleclassness.
Kristol’s not the only one who thinks McCain’s on course to lose. UK Telegraph reports Obama advisors are convinced he’ll win by a landslide:
Their optimism, which is said to be shared by the Democratic candidate himself, is based on information from private polling and on faith in the powerful political organisation he has built in the key swing states.
Insiders say that Mr Obama’s apparent calm through an unusually turbulent election season is because he believes that his strength among first time voters in several key states has been underestimated, both by the media and by the Republican Party.
They’re not relying on the much-vaunted youth vote, I hope.
WSJ: Re-tooling Palin for the debate. There’s a sitdown with senikor advsiors today at McCain’s ranch in Sedona, Ariz. Here’s hoping too many cooks don’t spoil the broth:
Some prominent Republicans and senior members of Congress have expressed worries about certain facets of the Palin campaign, particularly that Gov. Palin may be “overprepared” and not encouraged to be herself, an adviser said.
“She hasn’t had the time or inclination to question the judgments of the people telling her to hit her marks,” said one Republican strategist. “Gov. Palin is a team player, but the campaign needs to adjust to a game plan that works for her.”
Newsweek looks at “Mr. Cool and Mr. Hot,” offers some interesting takes on the candidates’ recent actions and history and what it says about their characters, but fails to live up to its promise of informing us how either would lead in “The Vices of Their Virtues” and “Worlds Apart,” concluding with this thin gruel:
Obama and McCain are complicated men, and the pieces of their lives don’t exactly fit together like a jigsaw puzzle. But in the four decades since their time in Southeast Asia, a picture of how each might lead begins to emerge. McCain has spent much of his life and career trying to guide America through a complete recovery from Vietnam, championing a Rooseveltian buildup of U.S. might and prestige. Obama is keen on reaching across vast divides like JFK; he seems more preoccupied with restoring U.S. legitimacy and securing America’s safety through patient work like Lugar’s and summits of understanding, and with rebuilding America’s strength from the “bottom up”—through its economy.
It’s fair to expect a McCain presidency to be a harder-edged one than Obama’s. Like his forefathers, McCain believes in “victory,” sees a world made up of enemies and friends and is determined to show resolve above all. His passionate advocacy of friends like Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili, his open detestation of Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin and his refusal to talk to Tehran could well produce a series of confrontations. For Obama, the danger is the opposite. He would need to take care that his eagerness for negotiation and mutual understanding doesn’t verge into appeasement, whether with Iran, Russia or other rogues. His focus would be different, too: Obama seeks to “contain” the Islamist threat rather than aim for some grand victory over all terrorists.
I seem to recall JFK’s reach across vast divides included tense, highly dangerous brinksmanship with the Soviets that Newsweek has cast in Kumbayahist, talks without pre-conditions terms. I’d suggest Obama’s surrenderist stance on Iraq and eargerness to treat from weakness with Iran show little in common with JFK’s bold Cold Warrior, from missiles in Turkey to a naval blockade of Cuba, the not insignificant “Ich bin ein Berliner” rhetoric … all pretty significant preconditions to the US-Soviet nuke talks that Newsweek trumpets.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:37 am Comments (2) on Monday, September 29, 2008
2 Responses to “O Ye Of Little Faith”
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September 29th, 2008 at 10:40 am
Kristol is half right. It wasn’t a mistake for McCain to go to DC, but he left to do the debate, then disappeared. It looks like he abandoned the process, when in fact, he was behind the scenes the whole time, according to the House GOP. But in a election, perception is everything, and with this financial crisis, real or perceived, I think we’re about to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.
McCain needs to go on the offensive. Now.
September 29th, 2008 at 1:26 pm
Obviously the economic crisis is hurting McCain. It’s ridiculous. Democrats are behind most of the current problems, and Obama has far fewer economic credentials than McCain does. How does law school, working as a community organizer, handing out education grants that failed to have the desired effect, and a stint as a state Senator and a couple of years as a US Senator somehow make him better able to understand the economy?