Watching Washington

Cure For Electoral Disaster Is Often Real Disaster

What will it take for Republicans to recover from their 2008 electoral disaster? It's a big question, but the answer is really pretty simple. The cure for electoral disaster is usually found in real disaster.

Defeated parties sometimes make changes that make them more politically attractive next time around. But what ultimately brings them back is a dose of really bad news for the country, which usually translates into good news for the opposition (whichever party that happens to be).

This month's election sent Republicans sifting through the ruins of a power structure that just two years ago encompassed all of official Washington. In search of an explanation and a sense of how to rebuild, they seem to be reaching a conclusion well beyond the flaws in John McCain's campaign or the heavy burdens of a faltering economy and a failed presidency.

The consensus among conservatives is that the GOP deserved a drubbing — not for losing touch with the electorate, but for drifting too far from the movement's own ideological moorings. The prescription is not to widen the outreach but to bind the party more securely to its orthodoxy and find better messengers to carry the message.

Those preaching this form of redemption take inspiration from an earlier debacle and subsequent rebirth. In 1964, the GOP nominated Barry "Conscience of a Conservative" Goldwater, who got just 38.5 percent of the vote against Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson. It was among the most resounding landslides in our history, and obituaries for the losing party were ubiquitous.

Yet it only took two years for Republicans to bounce back in the 1966 midterm elections, when they took away a stunning 47 seats in the House and three in the Senate. Two years later, the Democratic nominee got less than 43 percent of the presidential vote, Four years later, the Democrat would get just 37.5 percent, 1 point under Goldwater.

For the past 40 years, it has been GOP dogma that the Goldwater loss was not only worthwhile but essential: It established the party as the home of conservatism in America and pointed the way to wins in five of the next six presidential cycles (and seven of the next 10).

But did the GOP's turn to the right in the mid-1960s really propel the party's later dominance, or was it the sequence of catastrophes that befell the country under LBJ and, later, Jimmy Carter?

Within months of winning, Johnson was escalating the Vietnam War and making his presidency hostage to it. In 1965, the year he pushed through Medicare and the Voting Rights Act, rioting broke out in Los Angeles. Unrest spread to other cities, and the era's turmoil in the country and its culture would take a toll we are still measuring today. Johnson and his party became symbols of disunity and turbulence, demons it has taken Democrats decades to exorcise.

Such boom-and-bust cycles are the dynamic for much of our presidential history. Republican Herbert Hoover looked to be on top of the world when he won all but eight states in 1928. He had been in office only months when the stock market crashed and began the downturn that became the Great Depression.

Richard Nixon won 49 states in 1972, and his disasters began immediately. As the Watergate scandal was followed by the first Arab oil embargo, recession, inflation and the fall of Saigon, the Democrats reached another apogee in the elections of 1974 and 1976 (when the country elected Carter).

Time and again, the mandates of majorities have been defeated by disasters that overtook the once all-powerful figure in the White House. And while they can't really talk about it in public, this is the one route most likely to bring the Republicans of today back to power in some still-to-be-determined tomorrow.

There's nothing new about this. In politics, it's simply the circle of life. And the cycles continue. In 2004, after John Kerry had failed to dislodge George W. Bush, many Republicans thought they had finally established what Karl Rove called "a durable majority." One thing was clear in that moment: There wasn't going to be any more good news for Democrats until there had been some very bad news for the country. And before long, there was.

First came Hurricane Katrina and its miserable aftermath. Then Iraq got bad enough to turn voters against the war and cost Republicans control of the House and Senate in 2006. The following year, cracks appeared in the success story of the American economy, and the next year those cracks split wide open and revealed how hollow our prosperity was at its core.

Parties dismissed from power the way Republicans were in 2006 and 2008 do not regain their standing simply by being better stewards of their own ideas and programs. It will take a fresh disaster befalling the country in the months or years ahead, one that will make the country forget about the Bush administration and turn its ire on Obama and the Democrats in Congress.

7:02 PM ET | 11-17-2008 | permalink

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Obama Augurs New Era In The Capital And The Nation

This week's smashing victory by Sen. Barack Obama and his Democratic cohorts completes one of the most dramatic power shifts in American political history. It has taken just over two years to transform the landscape of power both in Washington, D.C., and nationally.

It may be hard to remember, but after the re-election of George W. Bush in 2004, his partisans openly speculated about the death of the Democratic Party as we knew it. Presidential adviser Karl Rove told one GOP audience there were increasingly large sections of the country where it was no longer acceptable to call oneself a Democrat.

A raft of books came off the presses proclaiming the permanence of Republican majorities in Congress and the Electoral College. This apparent consensus quickly became a commonplace. So it was probably inevitable that voters would contradict it at their first opportunity.

Beginning in the first year of his second term, President Bush began to taste defeats. His ideas for overhauling the Social Security system were not so much defeated as simply ignored. His initial inattention to the Hurricane Katrina disaster left much of the nation aghast. Then the war in Iraq ran off the rails.

A disgruntled public punished the president's party in 2006, restoring Democratic control of both chambers of Congress. Then a growing number of people began registering as Democrats and checking out the conga line of presidential candidates parading around the country in 2007.

That extended show culminated in a struggle between the two most compelling of these White House prospects, one bidding to be the first female president and the other the first African-American (or biracial) president. By the time this duel was resolved in favor of Obama, the Democrats were creating the narrative of 2008 — a change election at a time when popular discontent was spreading and getting deeper.

The result of these two "change elections" in 2006 and 2008 has been that the Democrats, so recently left for dead, have captured about 50 seats in the House and more than a dozen in the Senate. These gains have restored the party to about the same level of strength it had in each chamber prior to the Republican tsunami of 1994 generally recalled as "the Gingrich revolution."

It was perhaps appropriate that Newt Gingrich himself, after a full decade's absence from Congress, was ubiquitous this fall offering unsolicited advice to his party's candidates, including presidential nominee Sen. John McCain.

All this seems worth noting right now as we turn a chapter title page in the nation's political annals. We are ending not just the era of the Presidents Bush and the Gingrich Congress but the epoch of Ronald Reagan, the man whose mere name has been a mantra for party stalwarts for three decades.

I covered my first congressional campaign in the fall of 1978, a race that resulted in the election of F. James Sensenbrenner Jr. to the House with a majority of 61 percent.

Sensenbrenner, a conservative Republican from the suburbs of Milwaukee, was just 35 at the time and eager to be part of a bright new era in Washington. He saw himself as an agent of change, part of a new movement intent on cleansing the federal establishment.

His timing was excellent, as 1978 was the year Republicans recovered from two disastrous elections and began winning back seats in the House and Senate. Sensenbrenner's freshman classmates included such future luminaries as Dick Cheney of Wyoming and Newt Gingrich of Georgia. And as President Jimmy Carter struggled with challenges foreign and domestic, these Young Turks of the House GOP felt the national political momentum shifting in their favor.

In 1980, the conservative rising tide reached flood stage in Reagan's presidential campaign. The GOP took over majority control of the Senate and achieved working control of the House in tandem with conservative Democrats. True believers such as Sensenbrenner were in their glory.

In the 1990s, the Gingrich-led charge into majority status brought Sensenbrenner a committee chairmanship and later a chance to be a House prosecutor in the impeachment trial of President Bill Clinton. He would lead the Judiciary Committee in the years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

Altogether, Sensenbrenner has been able to serve under a Republican president or a Republican speaker of the House or both for all but four years of his 30-year career.

In the current Congress, he has been the senior Republican on the Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming. This week, at 65, he was re-elected to a 16th term, once again with little opposition. But one wonders how much longer he will stick around, trying to outlast his party's minority status.

Throughout the past three decades, the political energy that brought Sensenbrenner to office in the Reagan era has been the central force driving American politics most of the time. Certain arguments about taxes, national security and traditional social attitudes have been effective in election after election.

But now the experience of this year's campaign and the results of this week's vote suggest the age of Reagan may be passing, and with it the Bush dynasty, the Gingrich vision and the heydays of Messrs. Cheney and Sensenbrenner — and dozens of others like them.

Will this mean the end of the Republican Party? No. We will see a robust debate over the GOP's future, and we may see an altered version of the party emerge. New ideas will be offered and new faces will abound.

Before long, and perhaps before the Democrats think it possible, the next turning will come and these new Republicans will bring their party back. In the long run, it's all part of the process.

6:20 AM ET | 11- 5-2008 | permalink

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What If Headwinds Don't Blow McCain Away?

Let's say John McCain and the Republican Party pull off the biggest presidential upset in 60 years. Or let's say they lose but keep Barack Obama's margin well down in single digits. Either way, it will prove something fundamental about American politics that we all ought to bear in mind.

Even a historic change in an election does not change everything, and even what seems a major turning point is only one point in time.

America's swing voters seem poised to entrust the nation's future to Obama, a man many regard as a question mark — a mystery with multiracial roots and a foreign-sounding name. These voters also appear ready to elect the most decisively Democratic Congress in 30 years.

But if they do, let's remember it has taken the most extraordinary combination of circumstances to make it happen.

Some will say this election heralds the New Millennium, or the return of Big Government. But it more likely means simply this: Most of the country is ready to turn to the alternative party after a period of intense frustration with the Republican conservatives who have been in power in this decade.

That frustration is far more widely shared — across the full political spectrum — than a desire for Washington to exert more control over the economy or the society.

The prevailing element in this environment is the collapse of the presidency of George W. Bush. His approval ratings have plummeted from the 90s to the 20s, the most precipitous decline of its kind since polling began. And when presidents fall this dramatically in public esteem, the opposition party wins the next election.

Some on the right like to point out that the current Congress is even more unpopular than President Bush. But they elide the fact that Congress, unlike the White House, has two parties. When you probe a little deeper, you find that Hill Republicans are at least as vilified as the majority Democrats, if not more so.

That's one reason Democrats are about to gain half a dozen seats or more in the Senate this week, along with a net of 20 or more in the House (added to the 30 they captured in 2006). That would put them right back where they were in 1994, before the Republican takeover led by Newt Gingrich.

In sum, the Republican brand was in free fall even before the financial system seized up in mid-September, and the bad news has done nothing but accumulate since. Given all this, it is remarkable that McCain and his often haphazard campaign have not fallen off the edge of the earth.

Is McCain's competitiveness just a function of some voters' doubts about Obama? Surely there are those for whom he is just too different, too open to charges of "socialism" or perhaps too black for the White House.

McCain deserves credit for battling the headwinds he has faced: an unpopular president, an unpopular party, a miserable economy and a foreign policy based on wars with no end in sight. The nominee was also keenly aware that he was not the choice of his party's conservative base, an awareness that helped make Sarah Palin his running mate.

The Palin pick did revive the party's enthusiasm and vigor. Polls showed McCain nudging ahead, for about two weeks. But the Palin sugar rush dissipated quickly when the focus shifted to bank failures, Wall Street losses and a job-devouring recession.

Still, we have arrived at Election Day with McCain within striking distance. He has kept it suspenseful, narrowing the gap in the polls, demonstrating the power of the GOP's hold on the voters even in a profoundly Democratic year. The center-right era may be ending, but a new era has yet to be established, and McCain's underfunded and often incoherent campaign has proven how hard it is to beat a Republican — any Republican — in a presidential election.

Let us remember that only one Democrat has reached 51 percent of the popular vote since Franklin D. Roosevelt. That one Democrat was Lyndon B. Johnson in 1964. Jimmy Carter won in 1976 with just 50.1 percent, and Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton all fell short of 50 percent.

Polls show Obama's lead among likely voters to be as wide as double digits or as narrow as 4 points. Pollsters say the important thing is that all these polls show Obama winning and that he benefits from the state-by-state distribution of the vote in the Electoral College (the only tally that matters).

But we also know that Republicans come home and right-leaning independents revert to pattern. Longtime poll watchers cannot be surprised that McCain's vote share has climbed higher in the 40s in the closing days. And Democrats can't forget the misleading early exit polls of Election Day 2004.

America may be poised on the brink of great change, but it is hesitating in the moment. And if, in the end, the nation does take the plunge, Democrats should not forget the dread and doubt they felt on this election eve.

Yes, a change election challenges what we know about the parties and the voters. But much of what we know as political reality will survive that challenge. It will be relevant to governing in 2009, and it will be back for the elections of 2010 and beyond.

9:56 AM ET | 11- 3-2008 | permalink

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What To Watch For In The Campaign's Wild Last Week

After the longest presidential campaign in our history, Election Day is finally in sight.

We've had plenty of "never before" stories to tell in the 21 months since the first candidate debate in the primaries, and we surely haven't seen the last turn in the road yet.

Still, the endgame of an American election usually follows a pattern, and there are certain things we can expect to see in the final frantic days.

The Narrowing Gap -- Whatever the polls may have found up to now, they are likely to change at the end to reflect the "settling" of the vote. This often means voters return to the party they usually vote for, and it often means the gap between the two candidates shrinks.

The polling gap tightened in this fashion in four of the last five presidential elections. The exception was 1992, when a three-way race broke open at the end and allowed Bill Clinton to win by about 5 percentage points.

We have seen some evidence of this settling process in recent days as John McCain adds Republican leaners to his base of 90 percent support among hard-core Republicans. While his overall number was mired down around 40 percent through much of the past month, McCain is far more likely to finish with 45 percent or more of the general election vote. And this has begun to show up in the polls, some of which even have him above 45.

By the same dynamic, some of these polls have shown Barack Obama below 50 percent in recent days, allowing McCain to come within a point or two of a tie. These have all been polls taken among 'likely voters," meaning the responses of those who have not voted before are being excluded or given less weight.

Even without a major precipitating event, it is quite possible that in the final week, one or more polls of likely voters (so defined) will show McCain in a tie or pulling ahead. But does this mean the underlying dynamic of the election has changed? Not necessarily.

The Closing Circle -- Watch for the number of states visited by the two campaigns to shrink and for the itineraries to become almost identical. This is the truest indicator of where the two camps see the race. Whatever the polls show, the contest is really about reaching 270 votes in the Electoral College, and that is done by winning individual states. As we saw in 2000, it is possible to win the popular vote and lose the Electoral College.

So watch the travel schedules. McCain will be concentrating on a triangle of states from Missouri eastward to Ohio and Pennsylvania, then south to Virginia, North Carolina and Florida. Once he has completed a circuit of these six, he'll do another. And another.

He may toss in another swing through the Western trio (Nevada, Colorado and New Mexico), and he may venture another visit to his old friends in New Hampshire. And he may want to stop off in Indiana on his way.

But he will have to stress the Big Six triangle states because he needs to win them all, and neglecting any one of them would probably mean conceding it to Obama. All but Pennsylvania are states that voted for George W. Bush twice, so McCain should find sympathetic audiences in each. But why aren't these states already in his column? That question is the clearest indication of the score in this campaign.

Proliferating Superlatives -- Candidates in endgame tend to forget the simple declaratives and comparatives in favor of the superlative -- and even the apocalyptic. This is the most important election of our lives. The challenges have never been greater. But this can still be the greatest era in American history, and our best days are still be ahead of us. Huzzah! Cue the band.

Process Anxiety -- We will see more stories about glitches and problems in the voting system, including attempts to register cartoon characters and entire rosters of football players. There will be lawsuits over attempts to purge voter rolls (as in Colorado) and over attempts to register more voters (as in Ohio).

We will hear that electronic voting machines are going to break down, or not start, or switch votes once cast. They will be accused of eradicating entire precincts of data. We will hear of stolen signs and ballots and of fliers instructing voters to vote on alternating days, one party on Tuesday and the other on Wednesday. Partisan actors on the left and right will find in these anecdotes final evidence that the other side is trying to steal the election.

No doubt many of these stories will have some basis in real issues of voting procedure, and some of the controversy will be legitimate. But much of what we hear will also be overblown, overheated and overreported.

Random Ugliness -- Fed by rumors and fear, there will be reports of confrontation, intimidation and threats of violence -- both on Election Day and beyond. This year, much of this talk will be about race. The nomination of an African-American for president is a symbol of racial progress, to be sure, but it also touches a certain nerve in the body politic that responds with resentment and worse.

We have already seen stories about troubled adolescents reacting to the political dynamic in twisted ways. These may be minor incidents at the margin of our national life, but they are a glimpse into an undeniable part of our political culture. And the final throes of a national campaign bring every aspect of that culture to light.

11:14 AM ET | 10-28-2008 | permalink

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Why Can't The Presidential Polls Just Get Along?

Are you one of the people checking the Web several times a day to see how the presidential race is going? It's a lot like people watching the market fluctuations on the business channels or baseball fans sneaking peeks at the playoffs on their BlackBerrys.

If you're one of us obsessives, you probably already know the presidential race index known as the "RCP average." It refers to the average gap between Barack Obama and John McCain in the polls listed on the Web site Real Clear Politics.

Recently, that RCP average raised a lot of eyebrows by indicating that the gap in percentage points declined from 8.2 on Oct. 14 to 5.0 on Oct. 19. It even dropped below 5.0 in what you might call "intraday trading," suggesting Obama had lost nearly half his lead. Looking at the individual polls in the average, several had reduced Obama's lead from high single digits to low single digits.

Needless to say, this was a heartening trend for McCain supporters, who have not had much good news from the polls (or anywhere else) since mid-September. McCain supporters and surrogates were quick to suggest the voters were cooling on the young Democrat while the Republican's new message on taxes was resonating.

They had a feeling that Obama's "spread the wealth" comment (made impromptu to the now-famous Joe Wurzelbacher) was triggering fears of tax-and-spend Democrats swarming Washington. On Fox News, a pollster for Strategic Vision opined that "McCain was finally sounding like a Ronald Reagan conservative" in the last debate. Michael Barone wrote a column for National Review Online asking whether "Joe the Plumber" could "turn it around" for McCain.

But no sooner did this story line take hold than a new wave of polls came out this week showing Obama's lead essentially unchanged. In fresh polls taken of registered votes since the last debate, Obama was holding his lead by 11 points (Gallup Daily Tracking Poll) and 14 points (Pew Research Center).

So who's right? Could it be none of the above? All of the above?

Truth is, all these polls are legitimate and arguably correct, by their own lights. But they are describing slightly different parts of the same landscape. So you need to know a little about polling to put together the full picture.

The RCP average dropped suddenly last week for two reasons. First, the index dropped several polls that had begun their field interviews more than a week earlier. Second, the seven polls still in the index were all polls of likely voters (LVs) only. Likely voters are a smaller core within the larger world of registered voters (RVs), which is itself a subset of the total voting-age population.

The RCP ticked upward this week in part because it included a new poll of likely voters, done by ABC and The Washington Post, that pegged the Obama lead at 9 points.

Obviously, the likely versus registered argument is important.

For many years, pollsters have tried to improve their accuracy by picking the likelier voters to interview. In 2004, for example, John Kerry ran ahead of George W. Bush among registered voters in polls, but behind among likely voters. On Election Day, the likely voter number proved more predictive.

How do pollsters decide who is likely to vote? By far the best predictor of voting likelihood is voting history. If you haven't voted before, the research says you are not likely to vote this time either. Newly eligible voters and people who have never developed the voting habit are historically the least likely to vote.

Those most likely to have voted (and so most likely to vote again) are also more likely to be older than 30, better educated, better paid, married and white. So, the preferences of older, more affluent voters will be better represented among the LVs than the RVs. And on Election Day, the actual results have been closer to polls among LVs than RVs.

Will this dynamic hold in 2008?

That is the essential question underlying this election. If younger voters and people of color turn out in historic numbers, as the Obama campaign insists they will, they will not only defy history; they will change it.

And they may change the presumptions of polling as well.

In recognition of this possibility, Gallup now divides its results on likely voters into two reports. One uses the conventional definitions of voting likelihood and is called "Gallup Traditional" (rather like Coke Classic). The other allows the possibility of expanded turnout among nontraditional voting groups and is called "Gallup Expanded."

So on Oct. 18, for example, the tracking poll of RVs for the previous three days gave Obama an 8-point lead, the "Gallup Expanded" measure of LVs gave him a 4-point lead and the "Gallup Traditional" a 2-point lead.

That 2-point lead in the Traditional metric was often cited as evidence McCain was closing the gap. But three days later, all three of the Gallup measures had moved 3 or 4 points in Obama's favor.

You can check out the changing numbers in all three of these polls at the Gallup Web site.

And you can do it as many times a day as you like. See you there.

11:58 AM ET | 10-21-2008 | permalink

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Why McCain Debated As He Did

In the final debate of this presidential campaign, John McCain nailed his colors to the mast. He declared his allegiance to the GOP and to the conservative movement that has dominated it for the past 30 years.

This may not have been his first choice of a strategy. And it may not be the way to the White House in this historic year, owing to circumstances beyond McCain's control and indeed beyond anyone else's.

The U.S. economy is plummeting into recession with the global economy tumbling after. President Bush is unpopular to an almost unprecedented degree and perceived as dangerously irrelevant. Ever since the mortgage mess became the financial meltdown, the advocates of deregulation and unfettered free enterprise have been in free fall. The fortunes of the GOP have followed suit.

For the moment, the economy is everything. No one is talking or thinking of the other legs of the classic conservative tripod — national security and moral values. In fact, the U.S. faces multiple crises around the world right now, and threats to traditional mores abound. But hardly anyone noticed when Connecticut became the third state to recognize same-sex marriages last week, and the topic did not come up in the final debate.

What did come up was a list of issues on which the two parties have long occupied clearly marked territory. The candidates sparred predictably over taxes and spending, spreading the wealth, providing health care, creating jobs. They disagreed about abortion and about what kind of justices the Supreme Court needs next.

The salient questions of the evening were: What will you do to restore the credit and banking systems? How will you bring the markets back? Can you fend off or at least minimize the coming recession?

With few exceptions, the candidates stuck to the scripts their parties have followed for decades. McCain advocated tax cuts for the investing class; Obama saw the country rebuilding prosperity from the bottom up. McCain blamed the problems on a greedy few and a corrupt government. Obama said there had been much too much greed and far too little oversight from Washington.

For the moment, at least, the mood of the country seems to be swinging toward the Democratic prescription. McCain knows this and touts his aisle-crossing cred. He notes he voted for Supreme Court justices who favored abortion rights. He offers to allow unemployment benefits to go untaxed in the current crisis.

But by and large, McCain's economic plans aim to refurbish investment and the private sector while restraining government. Despite a record budget deficit this year (in nominal dollars), one that could balloon to $1 trillion in the coming recession, McCain insists that "no one's taxes should be raised."

That would mean all the money for all the bailouts and rescues the government has agreed to, plus all the wars and other commitments, must come from existing or lowered taxes — and borrowing. That is the supply-side solution, to be sure.

McCain also reached for other weapons familiar from recent presidential campaigns. He attacked voter sign-ups by the community organizations known collectively as ACORN, calling them a vast scheme to defraud the voting system. In recent days he has also blamed ACORN in large measure for the mortgage meltdown because it worked to get poor people into homes. He has made basically the same argument in blaming the government-sponsored Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac for too many low-income families' getting mortgages.

And he implied that contacts in recent years between Obama and 1960s bomber William Ayers mean Obama has something to hide about radical ties and terrorist sympathies today.

The facts in each case are, at the very least, disputable. But there is no argument among those conservative activists who consider voter fraud a major scourge and Obama an obvious liar. For weeks these elements of McCain's support have demanded that he raise these issues in the debates.

Until the last debate, McCain demurred. But in the end he had no option. A mere draw in the last round would seem to cement Obama's lead in the polls. There was no more time to await a Democratic collapse.

Will raising these matters during the debate save his campaign? The overnight polls gave little reason to think so. Indeed, some recent polling shows the Ayers and ACORN lines have hurt him at least as much as they have helped. Voters are clearly more interested in economics than in illegal registration or what McCain himself called "some old washed-up terrorist."

But to understand McCain's choice, you must remember that the conservative formula has been the way to win for several decades. The trail blazed by Barry Goldwater in defeat in 1964 and followed to success by Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan and the Bushes has brought home Electoral College victories in seven of the last 10 presidential cycles — usually with big margins.

Whipsawed by critics who told him to "take the gloves off" one week and "fire his campaign" the next, McCain could not please his own core backers and the larger electorate at once. It was time to make a choice. Keeping the base united and excited could mean everything for statewide and down-ballot GOP candidates throughout the country. And with the current economic and political climate turning colder by the day, pleasing the larger electorate seemed less and less realistic.

So McCain chose shelter in the issues, philosophy and tactics that have powered his party since its smashing midterm victories in 1978 (halfway through Jimmy Carter's presidency) and its sweeping landslide in 1980 (the start of the Reagan era).

To follow this path once more, even under current circumstances, was the only choice McCain could realistically make.

7:22 AM ET | 10-16-2008 | permalink

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Why Is McCain Campaigning Like This?

No one who has watched John McCain over much of his career can think he's happy about the campaign he's been running for president.

People who knew McCain when he represented the Navy on Capitol Hill in the 1970s, or during his 26 years in Congress or his first presidential run in 2000, do not recognize him in the caricature seen so far in the debates — much less in the brutal TV satires of those debates.

The McCain of the moment is deeply defensive about his party and his president, and just as deeply conflicted about what Republicans should do next.

One night, he tells a national TV audience he wants the federal government to spend $300 billion to buy up troubled mortgages and renegotiate them. That is a profoundly non-Republican idea that has many of his colleagues shaking their heads.

A few days later his closest friend in the Senate, Republican Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, tells another national TV audience McCain will cut taxes on capital gains to help investors. That is surely a Republican idea, but curiously timed. Do voters feel like it's time for another tax cut for Wall Street and the major investor class?

The next day the campaign backs off the tax cuts and says it will have a new plan shortly and needs to be ready to adapt to changing circumstances. Indeed.

Let's be generous for the moment and say that changing one's mind in a crisis is hardly an original sin. Policymakers of every political stripe in every place and time have done the same. Such a highly fluid situation demands fresh thinking and flexibility.

What must be far more disturbing for McCain's longtime fans, and for the candidate himself, is the demagogic tone of his public campaign. The Arizonan may not care for Barack Obama personally, but he resents being reduced to attacking him personally. You can hear and see it in the way McCain bites off the bitter words he must say.

McCain knows his recent strategy has been about fear and suspicion and the dark side of the American psyche. He is clearly uncomfortable with it, which is why he undercut the message himself by correcting supporters who called Obama "an Arab" or wondered if they'd be safe raising a child under an Obama presidency.

Moments such as this suggest the McCain of old is still in there, somewhere. But such moments also ensnare him in a worst-of-both-worlds trap. They please neither the admirers who abhor the brawling tactics nor the backers who beg him to go after Obama hammer and tong.

These warring impulses have raged within McCain's campaign, threatening to send it off the rails. Those who have been with him longest yearn for the "Straight Talk Express" of 2000. But there are also two waves of newer arrivals, one that saved McCain from oblivion a year ago and another that brought new discipline and force to the campaign late in the spring of this year.

In better times, the factions may have coexisted and McCain may not have suffered from their competition. But since the market meltdown, the strain has been showing on all concerned.

With three weeks to go, the nationwide conservative conversation is tinged with dismay. Some are calling for McCain to demonstrate nonpartisan leadership about the economy, the foreign threats and the campaign itself. Others urge "Top Gun" Johnny Mack to blaze away, to bring the haughty Obama to earth.

The problem is that neither approach is likely to work quite the way its advocates say it will — because the current predicament of the McCain campaign is not only of its own making, nor is it under anyone's control.

A presidential campaign, like a presidency, must respond to multiple, competing constituencies. A candidate, like a president, can imagine a bold stroke of action that might alter circumstances in his favor, but executing it is another matter entirely. Campaigns are dominated by the imperatives of right now: Things to do today, this hour, this minute. Stepping back to restrategize is close to impossible.

McCain might well want to fly his own plane and chart his own course. But he is piloting something much larger now than he has before, and he is not alone in the cockpit. He must keep in mind the fate of all those depending on him, from down-ballot candidates to the GOP itself and the conservative movement writ large. Doing what he wants is a luxury he can no longer afford.

The party's hard core clamors for a rough-edged ending this fall, both to bloody Obama and to keep the rank and file on fire. Much depends on making November as competitive as possible.
McCain may not be happy about it, but many of the people behind him are not nearly as worried about winning ugly as they are about the consequences of losing badly.

7:22 AM ET | 10-14-2008 | permalink

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What We (Still) Don't Know About Obama and McCain

Considering that one of these two men will soon be president, there is a great deal about their thinking that we should know and don't.

Let's allow that the second presidential debate between Sens. McCain and Obama was serious and reasonably dedicated to policy. The "town hall" format also allowed both men to move about and get face to face with individual citizen questioners, even if it did not prove as friendly to McCain as he might have hoped.

But neither the format nor the mood of the citizen questioners allowed for the full menu of issues we had been promised.

Sure, it was inevitable that economics would dominate. The country is in shock over the credit crunch and looming recession, the plunge in home and portfolio valuations.

But in their eagerness to address Issue One, NBC and Gallup chose questions and questioners fixated on it to the virtual exclusion of everything else. The only substantive news of the night occurred when McCain committed himself to buying most of the nation's troubled mortgages, a sweeping proposal he said would cost $300 billion.

That idea has been discussed in recent weeks as the crisis has worsened. The Bush administration and congressional leaders decided it was more efficient to buy up the mortgage-backed securities that have gone sour with the bursting of the real estate bubble.

Energy and health care did make cameo appearances, but primarily in the larger context of Americans' economic well-being. A question about asking Americans for sacrifice was treated as just another chance to talk about shielding us all from financial storms.

Toward the end of the 90-minute event, the subject was changed briefly to Iraq, Iran, Israel, Russia and the candidates' admitted inability to foresee the future. Then it was closing statements and good night.

Even when questioners attempted to get down to cases, the candidates nimbly eluded their grasp. For his part, moderator Tom Brokaw of NBC proved unwilling to enforce the questioner's point.

For example, one questioner via e-mail asked who might be the next secretary of the Treasury, a post of unprecedented power of economic decisions under the new enacted rescue plan for the financial industry. Neither candidate seemed eager to respond. McCain mentioned billionaire investor Warren Buffett, admitting he was an Obama supporter. Obama said he thought "Warren" would be a good choice but that there might be others. He named no one and went on to make another point.

McCain also mentioned Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, who for a time was cited as a potential vice presidential candidate (before Sarah Palin got the gig).

Want to make odds on either Buffett or Whitman winding up at Treasury? These are more like the kind of names you hear when a prospective president does not want to name the people he's really thinking about.

But key appointments will drive the next government, and voters should demand to know more about who they are likely to be. Why not tell us about your short list for State and Defense? And after the struggles of the past eight years, knowing who the next attorney general will be would make sense too.

For that matter, why shouldn't candidates be asked to name some people they have in mind for the Supreme Court? The four current justices who constitute the court's liberal wing are ages 69, 70, 75 and 88. Swing voter Anthony Kennedy is 72. Odds are that at least one or two of these seats will need filling by the next president, and one of the four conservatives (average age: 60) might need replacing too.

Yet we know only that McCain would appoint people like President Bush's two successful appointees and Obama would favor the kind of jurist appointed by Bill Clinton (the only Democrat to have had the opportunity in more than 40 years). That's a general contrast, to be sure, but not much more.

Of course, neither candidate wants to stir a distracting squabble over the qualifications of the people he may be considering. By the same measure, neither candidate wants to talk about immigration, because even a cautious formulation will cost votes either among Hispanics or among Anglos upset by those present in the country illegally.

What would either candidate do about the expiring No Child Left Behind Act? How about the faith-based initiatives sending tax money to religious institutions to perform nonreligious functions? Are there conditions under which the nation's defense might require reinstatement of the military draft, and if so, would it apply to women? Is it possible to contemplate a continuation of the Bush doctrine and current levels of forward deployment without a draft?

The salience of the economy as an issue has eclipsed the issues of Iraq and the war on terrorism. Indeed it has obscured the entire range of other issues, much as in the 1930s when all was subsumed in the Great Depression.

The single-issue phenomenon seems for the moment to be Obama's friend. But it is not really the voters' friend. It narrows the campaign's process of candidate discovery to a single obsessive concern, depriving the country of its best chance to find out just what its next leader really has in mind.

1:28 AM ET | 10- 8-2008 | permalink

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Palin Proves Worthy of Her (Current) Role

Let's say you just arrived back in the U.S. from five weeks abroad, perhaps in a remote location with no access to news of America.

And let's say you tuned in to the vice presidential debate without preconceptions about either the Republican, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, or the Democrat, Sen. Joseph Biden of Delaware.

What would you make of what you saw?

Here was Biden, a man in his mid-60s working hard to preserve his dignity and govern his tongue. He kept it up for 90 minutes while also displaying some verve and flashing a warm smile. The more you knew about Joe Biden and his usual tendency to spiel on after making a point, the more you would have been impressed.

What's more, he seemed to have some real feelings and easy familiarity with issues and recent history.

But what of this woman? You would have to have been amazed to see her, given the political climate and expectations when you left in August. You would sense immediately that this unfamiliar face was the focal point of the evening, lighting up the stage and romancing the camera.

Palin was clearly two decades younger and, it must be said, strikingly attractive for a governor of any state. She also seemed the hunter through much of the evening, full of rhetorical energy and prepared to make her case in her own terms. She took the fight to her opponent from the moment she introduced herself and asked if she could call him Joe.

She also laid claim to the sympathies of the television audience, saying her answers might not please her opponent or moderator Gwen Ifill of PBS's NewsHour but that she was going to connect directly with the American people. Indeed, she spent the entire 90 minutes talking to the camera lens.

Sufficient are Palin's talent and skill that she was aggressive without being off-putting. She seemed eager and ready to engage on a range of issues, especially because she was asked only to hold forth on her positions and not to produce any specific information.

She had memorable phrases -- from "drill baby drill" to "white flag of surrender" -- and a lively demeanor that just wouldn't quit.

But did she seem to belong on that stage, poised to be a heartbeat away from the Oval Office?

That may be a question no one can answer in innocence. After just five weeks in the national spotlight, Palin has become a pivot point in American politics, defining our great divide. For those who have decided to believe in her as a rustic gem, a Harry Truman for our times, she represents the inherent, exceptional goodness of the American people.

There is a kind of naive genius in this national myth, and it wields great power, especially when associated with a sudden, new face. Something of the same dynamic has propelled the very different candidacy of the Democratic presidential candidate, Barack Obama.

But on this night in St. Louis, the onus was on Palin. Did she prove she was ready to be president? Even her supporters would probably not go that far. Did she prove she was ready to be vice president? That depends on whether you think the qualifications for president-in-waiting are substantially lower.

What Sarah Palin did seem to prove is that she's qualified to be a vice presidential candidate. She is back to being at least a neutral factor in McCain's election equation, after three weeks as a skyrocket and two more falling back to Earth.

Proving herself worthy of her place on the ticket is significant because she failed to clear that bar in her recent disastrous interviews with Katie Couric on the CBS Evening News. Calls for her to step aside for the sake of the party may have been few and far between, but Internet blogs and talk radio can accelerate and amplify doubts overnight. For her sake, and McCain's, it was crucial that she prove herself by performing well against Biden.

That she did, at least for her partisans. And that was enough.

7:26 AM ET | 10- 3-2008 | permalink

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Hey McCain And Obama: Who's Your Paulson?

Here's a quick question: Who were President George W. Bush's first two secretaries of the Treasury?

If no names come to mind — or if you're surprised to hear there were two before Henry Paulson — you are in good company. Until Paulson left Goldman Sachs in June 2006 to become Bush's third try at Treasury, the position commanded far less notice than it does today. The big newsmakers in the first seven years of the Bush Cabinet were of course the secretaries of State and Defense and the attorneys general.

All that changed when the mortgage and credit crisis deepened over the past year and Paulson emerged as the man of the hour. His power seems to have grown with every month and every downturn in the market. When a deteriorating situation became a full-scale meltdown, Paulson and his staff brought forth the massive $700 billion plan Congress is now expected to adopt (with alterations of its own) this week.

So for the Bush regime and its economic program at this crucial moment, the point man, the triggerman and the main man is Hank. The president has deferred to him in the present moment, and the power he would wield under the terms of the new bailout agreement would be unprecedented in American economics. Newsweek put him on its cover with just two words: KING HENRY.

An exaggeration? Not in the financial world. It is stunning to realize how much authority Paulson has had to choose winners and losers in recent weeks and months, and truly breathtaking to contemplate the potential for that power's expansion.

Sure, there is to be a bipartisan oversight board. But we've seen this movie. And that's why the centralizing of authority remains a salient point of attack for critics on the right and the left (Mr. Gingrich, meet Mr. Nader). Yet the plenipotentiary Treasury secretary remains a key feature of the plan.

So if the Treasury secretary is to be the new czar, who will be the new Treasury secretary? Paulson serves a president who will leave office in less than four months. Unless the new president asks him to stay — as Warren Buffet and others have urged — Paulson will soon transfer his extraordinary new powers to a new pair of hands.

Whose hands will those be? Just one man will decide, and that man will be either John McCain or Barack Obama. So it would have made sense, in the first presidential debate, for moderator Jim Lehrer of PBS to ask these two men to reveal whom they had in mind for Treasury secretary. Why not tell the world just which wizard of Wall Street we can expect to see running the financial industry next?

Back when McCain and Obama were choosing their running mates, the broad public perked up and the media got a case of the vapors. Shouldn't the new czar of all sectors public and private be at least as important?

At the moment, everyone is guessing. We see the men and women the candidates have recruited as advisers, to be sure. We know that until he embarrassed his candidate, former Sen. Phil Gramm (now working for the Swiss investment bank UBS) was co-chairman of McCain's campaign. After he called the U.S. "a nation of whiners" suffering from "a mental recession," Gramm made himself scarce. But if McCain were to become president, Gramm might come out of hiding in a hurry.

Few may recall, but Gramm himself ran for president for a time in 1996, and his campaign chairman was none other than John McCain, who in the past has referred to Gramm as his "economic brain."

Other prospects include some of McCain's former rivals in the presidential hunt, such as former governor and venture capitalist Mitt Romney, and prominent backers from the executive boardroom, such as Carly Fiorina (late of Hewlett-Packard) or Meg Whitman (eBay).

Obama has not been seen as often in the company of blue chip business folk, with a few notable exceptions such as former Fed Chairman Paul Volcker and Robert Rubin (the best of Bill Clinton's three Treasury secretaries and a Paulson predecessor as Goldman Sachs CEO). Neither is considered a likely pick for the rigorous new task at Treasury, although there has been talk of a return engagement for his immediate successor, Lawrence Summers, who had several stormy years as the president of Harvard University in the interim.

Another prospect often mentioned is Timothy Geithner, president of the New York Fed, who has been known to advise Obama. Steven Rattner, a onetime reporter for The New York Times who became an investment banker in the 1980s, is also regarded as a prospect.

Whoever gets the nod will need to balance the demands of the financial and political communities while also navigating the world of the media. It's quite a job description. Let's hope it gets some airtime in the "town hall" debate slated for Oct. 7.

And by the way, the first two Bush secretaries of the Treasury were Paul H. O'Neill and John W. Snow.

O'Neill left after two years very much at odds with his boss. Not only did he resist the tax-cutting at the heart of the Bush economic program, he sponsored a study that estimated the country would need a 66 percent increase in income taxes to meet all its obligations at home and abroad in coming decades. If that were not bad enough, O'Neill published a book (The Price of Loyalty) accusing the Bush administration of using the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks to justify a pre-existing plan to invade Iraq.

Snow was not nearly so outspoken, and his 42 months on the job saw economic conditions improve dramatically. But Snow was not able to able to transfer the luster of the improved economy to his boss, who needed it badly. After ignoring broad hints from the White House for more than a year, he gave way to Paulson in June 2006.

Since then, Paulson has given the job unprecedented importance and visibility. His successor will have to live with both.

7:28 AM ET | 09-29-2008 | permalink

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