In The Event Of An Obamergency …
What my cousin David said:
I’ll be voting for John McCain on November 4.
I’ll be voting for the man who was right about the surge, who holds clear-eyed views about terrorism and America’s enemies, who has fought for leaner government over 20 years, who maneuvered the Roberts and Alito nominations through the Senate, who was right about Vladimir Putin, and who has throughout his career shown a personal candor and humility unusual in national politics.
Like a lot of Republicans, I’ll be swallowing a great deal in order to cast my vote.
… OK, now for the sermon.
American voters are staggering under the worst financial crisis since at least 1982. Asset values are tumbling, consumer spending is contracting, and a recession is visibly on the way. This crisis follows upon seven years in which middle-class incomes have stagnated and Republican economic management has been badly tarnished. Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues.
We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama’s associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don’t care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.
…
Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for the next president, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.
I’m not suggesting that we remit our opposition to a hypothetical President Obama. Only that an outgunned party will need to stay cool. A big part of Obama’s appeal is his self-command. It’s a genuinely impressive quality. Let’s emulate it. We’ll be needing it.
Yeah, what he said. The first half, that is. The second half … a couple of points. Of course the economic crisis has to be addressed. McCain has been doing that, for better or worse, and is at least holding, unsupported claims of polling freefall notwithstanding. Ayers, Rezko, other character and judgment issues have to be addressed, whether by McCain, by Palin or by proxies.
As for GOP rage in the event of an Obama win, the need for cool calculation … I doubt apoplexy will be the enduring, uniform or even overriding reaction, although undoubtedly there will be plenty of it, especially in the blogosphere. Obama’s appearance of self-command is not in small part a result of the fact he has not been seriously challenged by the press or by any of his opponents to date, due to the gingerness with which the nation’s first viable black candidate is being treated. When he has been challenged, he quickly descends into incoherence … witness that nonsensical Chequers/Wright/I Have A Dream speech … and still is heralded as a visionary by his adoring press.
Of course the GOP’s standard bearers in and out of Congress will need to be calm and considered. But President Obama will be his own worst enemy. After the Democratic-controlled United States Congress, that is. In the event of an Obama presidency, a large part of the GOP agenda will, of necessity, involve letting Obama be Obama. After the initial congratulatory and exultant lefty glow … the world briefly liking us better, the lefty celebratory orgy … comes the reality of Obamist foreign policy, crisis reaction, social agenda-pushing and Obamanomics. I don’t know about you, but I’m looking forward to the Cabinet and lower-level appointments, the departmental executive actions, the pending health-care debate debacle, seeing how he intends to support the gay rights agenda while opposing it … particularly when tranny rights get thrown into the equation. The talks with Iran, it might take a while for those to bear fruit. Remember Clinton’s deal with North Korea?
Iran is not in so neat a box, and on all these counts, yes, damage can be done. These things happen in life. After all, these wars we are now engaged in began actively festering under the Carter administration. We still live with the actions and inactions of the Clinton adminstration domestically and abroad. The actual defense of the United States and its Middle East allies against Iranian nuclear ambitions may have to undertaken by Israel. If it doesn’t happen this month, I’d suggest some time between Nov. 5, 2008, and Jan. 19, 2009.
But sometimes you have no choice but to sit back and watch the show. Maybe that is what David is talking about. GOP leadership that can calmly, patiently, pointedly express opposition views and alternatives, fully aware it is simply positioning for 2012, without succumbing to impotent rage, while quietly triangulating with Democratic moderates to deftly, gently thwart Obama’s will in those cases where it is possible. Because impotent rage isn’t really that attractive … just look at the last eight years of Bush-bashing, after all, even when they actually controlled Congress. If it was, do you think Obama would be in a virtual dead heat with McCain right now?
Which raises the question of whether it is even time to start worrying about the Obama years. I’m not. Plenty of time for that later. Here’s Zogby at the Boston Herald. Don’t Believe The Hype:
The presidential race is still too close to call and could come down to the very last weekend before voters decide if they like or distrust Barack Obama, a national pollster predicts.
“I don’t think Obama has closed the deal yet,” pollster John Zogby told the Herald yesterday.
Zogby’s latest poll, released yesterday in conjunction with C-Span and Reuters, shows Obama and John McCain in a statistical dead heat, with the Illinois Democrat up 48-45 percent.
Zogby said the race mirrors the 1980 election, when voters didn’t embrace Ronald Reagan over then-President Jimmy Carter until just days before the election.
“The Sunday before the election the dam burst,” Zogby said of the 1980 tilt. “That’s when voters determined they were comfortable with Reagan.”
Now voters are wrestling with two senators with opposite resumes – Obama, at 47, the unknown, and the established 72-year-old McCain.
Zogby said he’s still hearing from moderates and non-partisan voters – what he calls “the big middle” – who are still shopping for a candidate.
“It still can break one way or the other,” Zogby says.
The three-day survey polled 1,220 likely voters – about 400 people a day. Zogby will continuously poll right up until the November election.
The latest poll numbers may reflect the bump that McCain received after his running mate, Alaskan Gov. Sarah Palin sparred with Obama’s running mate, Delaware Sen. Joe Biden during the first and only vice presidential debate last week.
The poll shows that the two White House contenders have no problem attracting support from their own parties.
Obama is winning 84 percent of the Democratic Party support and McCain has 85 percent of the GOP support, but Obama has the edge among sought-after Independent voters.
He leads McCain among independents, 48 percent to 39 percent, according to the poll.
Obama also has support from a slightly higher percent of conservative voters than McCain gets from liberal voters, but the advantage is small, according to the poll.
Pollsters surveyed 1,220 likely voters and asked approximately 39 questions. The margin of error is plus or minus 2.9 percentage points
RCP polls and national average here. Obama up 5.
Zogby’s latest three-day average, including one post-debate day in which Obama gets a slight bump but so curiously do undecided numbers, gives Obama 3.6 points.
Local commenter The Big Henry at his own blog, Remebrance in Spacetime notes the dangers of enjoying a bonfire of vanities.
Posted by Jules Crittenden at 9:29 am Comments (2) on Thursday, October 9, 2008
2 Responses to “In The Event Of An Obamergency …”
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October 9th, 2008 at 6:55 pm
I fully agree. Obama´s collision with unbending reality will at least be interesting to watch. But what David says about having a positive agenda is also true. It is required to build new majorities, to create a conservative cultural climate in the long term and also as basic marketing.
Marketing first: Voters want to know what you will do for them. Being “bipartisan” or a “maverick” is not a policy and it has no benefit in itself. It is merely the “reason why” as in “here´s why you can trust me to do this”.
Obama´s change and hope rhetoric is rightly ridiculed but the messiah phase has been over for a while now. Obama´s economic proposals (e.g. health care) are vague or implausible, but he talks about them and McCain doesn´t really.
Bush had a domestic message on both the culture and the economy. And say what you will, Bush was a winner.
If McCain had campaigned on a couple of common sense economic initiatives (like his intriguing health care plan), he would have more credibility in these difficult times and he would also look better attacking Obama. And who better to sell them than the wonderful Sarah Palin, who would come across as totally credible talking about these issues to average voters but is given nothing to work with?
What I always want to say to Republicans is this: you either want to govern or you want someone else to govern. If you really believe that conservative ideas are good, then they must be good for everyone. And it is your job to explain them to people, educate them and make these ideas work in practical terms (and then brag about it – we need to learn how to brag). That does not mean selling out or pandering. To the contrary. It means ceding no more ground to the enemy: not minorities, not health care, not education, not inner cities, not low income families. Everyone has a little conservative in them wanting to get out. Small inroads here and there will make the difference between winning and losing. There is no reason why Democrats should own these issues or people.
If you don´t believe that, you are probably just hoping for identity politics and “the base” to bail you out election after election. But wishful thinking is unconservative.
October 10th, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Well said, Jules, and well said, wf.
Frum seems to be something of a fatalist. I hate that.
I expect McCain to win, and I am looking forward to saying to people who are trying to get my name right on the phone, “Sarah, like the vice president.”
I am at Rochester Institute of Technology this weekend checking up on a new freshman, and we attended an entrepreneurship conference here today. Quite the excellent antidote to the news. Capitalism is alive and well in certain pockets of the thinking business community. We heard from folks like an astute venture guy who founded a VC firm here to help keep capital in the region–because he cares about this place. And a successful serial entrepreneur who came back to the region to raise his kids in a sane environment. On and on like that.
I wish McCain would stand up for capitalism. The Ayers stuff is being bungled, I think, not for lofty Frumish reasons, but because there are bigger issues here than sixties radicals who ought to be in jail. Yes, Ayers is a worm, but if McCain has been able to forgive his captors, I imagine he could forgive an idiotic war protester from 30 years ago, even one who was violent. (Not that I do.)
What upsets me most about Obama’s association with Ayers is that the two of them worked together to indoctrinate kids into Marxist views. They did this under the guise of educational reform, and yet they damaged these children. And they damaged our culture. Embracing the evil that is Marxist dogma should be a very serious crime in our society. Instead it is apparently considered good fun and a way to be cool. Meanwhile our economy is being destroyed by the people who have been taught to misunderstand it.
Yes, we need to learn how to brag. Explain our ideas and make them clearer. I have pretty much given up on the ability of government to do this, but I have faith that we the people can. And, today, anyway, I have faith that we will.