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One explanation for why Obama’s lead isn’t even bigger

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The handwringing over Barack Obama’s modest lead in the polls is already rather tiresome — “Why isn’t Obama up by double digits?” the political world demands to know — and there’s no shortage of competing rationales to explain it. But the NYT’s Frank Rich offers one of the more compelling explanations I’ve seen: “[T]he public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is.”

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image…. With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April

, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party. […]

Most Americans still don’t know, as [TPM’s Josh] Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

There’s a very good reason Republicans have worked so aggressively to make this election a referendum on Obama — because if the campaign is about McCain, the Republicans will lose. Badly.

Comments

  • Don't Blow It, Dems!

    says:

    I think that’s right, but since the TV talking heads have abdicated their responsibility to report these things, how do we get the word out to those who don’t read Frank Rich and don’t read this blog?

  • blooming pol

    says:

    I don’t wonder that people have “Obama fatigue” given that McCain’s and the RNC’s websites are all about Obama. I suspect Goldilocks is correct, this is where we come in, talking to people, writing local letters to the editor about what McCain is really like, etc. Hard work, but if we don’t do it, who will?

  • Tom Cleaver

    says:

    Three cheers for Goldilocks – that’s the only way we win. I find even calling Obama supporters an amazing lack of knowledge about “the real McCain.” When you tell people the truth about him, they are largely amazed. And then they get mad that they’ve been duped and are even stronger for Obama. Doing this education process with independents is the most important thing an Obama supporter can do now.

  • Lew Scannon

    says:

    The McCain campaign has to turn this election into a referendum on Obama, his position on every major issue is against what the majority of most Americans believe.

  • ericfree

    says:

    It’s not just McCain, who Lord knows is thoroughly misrepresented, but the Parties themselves. Many people, especially white voters, the most reliable voting bloc, still have a late ’50s view of the political Parties. The Republicans are responsible, kindly, take care of people without disabling them with welfare, the party of “nice” people who live on your block. As the McCain, and even the Clinton campaign, has tied themselves in knots to demonstrate, the Democrats are the party of “others:” nonwhite immigrants (one of the few things that’s still true), drunken, lynching, but still comic southerners, crooked union bosses, firebreathing communistic college radicals.

    The truth is apparent to most who read this column: Nixon’s (actually Kevin Phillips and Lee Atwater’s) Southern Strategy along with Democratic intolerance of racial intolerance moved racists all over the country to the Republican column. Republican persecution of unions over the last forty years has had the unintended result of severely decreasing the number of corrupt union leaders. Today’s unions are more responsible in part because of increased legal oversight by an overtly hostile government.

    The Father Knows Best universe completely ignores the rise of narrow-minded, opportunistic neocons, an “other” taking advantage of the good nature of America if there ever was one. And the “communistic” college radicals who would destroy the country instead remade the Democratic Party into a multicultural umbrella organization representing, for the most part, America’s best impulses and actions.

    That’s the real untold story. Ex-Republicans like Lincoln Chafee and Jim Leach, founders of Republicans For Obama, are testimony that the Republican Party which actually was a positive force doesn’t exist anymore. The new Republican Party is an uneasy alliance of Big Money (always a Republican staple), neocons, religious fanatics and what used to be called Southern Democrats. Obama, to his credit, may be the best expression of the new Democratic Party.

    That’s the story. Now where’s the media unafraid to write it?

  • zhak

    says:

    The Republicans have been aggressively moving the country toward total stupidity since Reagan began gutting our education standards.

    Of course most folks have no idea what’s going on — they’re not supposed to …

  • AJB

    says:

    because if the campaign is about McCain, the Republicans will lose. Badly.
    Then let’s make this about McCain.

  • hark

    says:

    I don’t think it’s senseless, tiresome handwringing, and I don’t think Frank Rich has the answer. Obama ought to be way ahead. But I suspect that Hillary, Biden or Dodd would be in the same predicament had they won the primary campaign. It’s a larger problem than the candidates themselves. And it’s a big problem.

    Since there’s no way to test this hypothesis, there’s little reason to expound on it. But I think the American people simply don’t have the interest, or the tools, to understand what’s happened. They only know that Bush failed. They don’t know that it’s the underlying ideology, the policies that failed. Bush is gone, there’s a new guy, and he starts off with the same Republican advantage that they’ve enjoyed for thirty years. They know how to fight, and they know how to punch the right hot buttons.

    So McCain can continue in the same vein as his forbears – government is evil, we have to get it out of your hair, off your backs, slash taxes and spending, except for the war machine, and put more money into our muscle flexing so we don’t bog down in the next Iraq or Afghanistan. Sounds good, and then they top it off by Swiftboating the Democratic opponent, and voila, back in the White House again.

    It works. And it might again this time, because the American people are clueless.

  • john

    says:

    Look, we at the grass root level have to start showing who McCain really is, for start there is a video over at c&l that is perfect, it’s the true teller, please check it out and pass it along to other, remember it is true telling not an attack.

  • Prup (aka Jim Benton)

    says:

    TomC: I agree that we have to do this sort of ‘semi-professional’ phone calling, but after suffering with a half-dozen telemarketers a day, I wonder how many people don’t tune them out.

    However, for you, for Goldilocks, and others, if you do get through to someone’s mind, not just their ears, do you suggest that they call their own friends and tell them what yoy’ve told them? (Especially if they start out pro-Obama, and you are just giving them useful information.)

    Okay, here we go again, but it can’t be said enough…

    WE are Obama’s surrogates.

  • ROTFLMLiberalAO

    says:

    Which reminds me of the run-up to Bush’s Iraq war mess…
    Remember how in retrospect, the media collectively wrung its hands and admitted it had played cheerleader more often than critical analyst?

    Now here we go again: Media culpa.

    Quite frankly, I have no desire to watch Big media reflect backwards in 2010, and once again pat their culpability on the back, acknowledging that they failed to cover Mister MaGoo’s fumbles and foibles in 2008. And that, of course, they need to do a better job…
    Bosh. Pish. Fie.
    It will be too late then.

    Truly, if MaGoo wins, Step A for me is to immediately –the very next day– quit the subscriptions to every slice of mass media I get. I will be out of the loop then. With no desire to ever fund anything even remotely MSM.

    Of course that is just Step A…
    What about Steps B-Z?

    Which leads me to this conclusion: Everyone needs to think hard and long about how a MaGoo-led country will effect their world-view. And in that context I like to suggest an inconvenient truth: The future of humanity will not be what it is used to be. Things are going to spiral out of control very quickly…

    For me, a MaGoo victory means a drastic change in values and plans.
    I’ve thought about it… Have you?

  • beep52

    says:

    Rich is fine as far as he goes, but hark @ 9 brings it home. Yes, Americans have been taken by the myth of John McCain, to a large extent because they’ve been blinded by the propaganda of modern conservatism which relies on simplistic solutions, inherent virtues and evils, and eschews knowing or thinking too much. It’s a self-referential ideology.

    It takes a lot of work, courage, self-assurance and an open, inquiring mind to challenge the belief systems of the day, and for decades, we’ve been told liberals are evil pessimists and conservatives, virtuous optimists. Few want to face the realization that their beliefs are based on bullshit. Few can begin to contemplate that their beliefs aren’t even their beliefs, but the product of upbringing, environment and the rants of loudmouths. We all have too much invested.

    I thought the Iraq debacle would be enough to shake American’s out of their coma. It didn’t. For a time, Hurricane Katrina forced us to deal with the disparity between what we heard and what we saw, but that soon faded. I thought the rapid increase in energy and its effect on nearly all consumer goods would wake people up. But the beauty of conservative thinking is that it had a simple answer at the ready — drill for more oil! Bite-sized, easy to swallow and it didn’t taste like that yucky medicine the liberals prescribed.

    So, hark is right. We have a big problem, and Americans are clueless, in part because they’ve been told being clueless is a virtue. God is great, America is infallible. John McCain is a hero. Go out and scorch that VISA!

  • Bruno

    says:

    I think that Frank Rich brought up a good point in his article, that deserved repeating over and over when discussing Obama’s benefits with low-information voters who might believe all the lies being spouted…

    If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”

    Tell any Republican, who ‘believes’ what Corsi writes, about what his thoughts are about McCain supporting Al Qaeda and his ties to organized crimes. So all that MUST be true if Obama is a muslim, right?

  • SteveIL

    says:

    Maybe Obama isn’t further along because he, along with his minions (like Frank Rich), are trying to call racists all who don’t agree with Obama (Obama has done this twice). Here’s Rich:

    Obama has also been defeated by racism (again). He can’t connect and “close the deal” with ordinary Americans too doltish to comprehend a multicultural biography that includes what Cokie Roberts of ABC News has damned as the “foreign, exotic place” of Hawaii.

    Typical liberal tripe.

  • Steve in Sacto

    says:

    “[T]he public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is.”

    This statement alone proves the failure of the Obama communications strategy to date.

  • Barbara J. Hatcher

    says:

    I keep hearing commentators talk about the strength of McCain’s delivery at Saddleback but it was so short on substance. Senator McCain still did not answer the faith question. The story he gave was not about his faith but the faith of a guard , who when he could, extended an Christian hand. All we know from that story is that he was moved by another Christian’s kindness.

    While stories are powerful, McCain’s stories helped him not asnswer the questions.

  • SaintZak

    says:

    “There’s a very good reason Republicans have worked so aggressively to make this election a referendum on Obama — because if the campaign is about McCain, the Republicans will lose. Badly”

    But there is also no good reason why the Democrats have not made this election a referendum on John McCain AND the Republicans. They’re allowing the Republicans to do there very same thing that screwed them on 04.

  • SF

    says:

    It may be wise, strategically, for Sen. Obama to stick to policy and avoid personal attacks — though well aimed verbal darts in the debates can be useful (consider how well Biden’s crack, “All he is is a noun, a verb, and 9/11” worked on another candidate), BUT it is incumbent upon informal and official surrogates to hammer home McC’s utter mendacity, warmongering and flat out indifference to real people. Although it isn’t nice to say, and liberals tend to do no social harm, McC is not tracking, he does not appear literally — given his performance in the campaign — fit to command, he can’t seem to remember even important things one minute to the next. The Right would love to have another obedient puppet tol sign, or not, assorted legislation in the Oval Office, as per directions, but I really don’t think voters want another (literally) Empty Suit there. That, and the lying and bullying, is the Real John McC that has to be communicated.

  • joey

    says:

    Please don’t underestimate the power of one person sharing with just one other person for it is the basis of an ever growing fellowship. Printing up 50 copies of a pro Obama article or even an anti-McCain truth piece is only a couple of dollars at Kinko’s. Putting them up on bulletin boards, in mail boxes etc is hardly time consuming. The word gets spread one person at a time.

    You don’t know McCain is truly an overwhelming problem with the voting public as his image is entirely phony, a media lie. a complete epic of hypocrisy besides being dangerously misleading and because of his POW status, held up to be untouchable as in “How dare you?…He was a POW for chrissakes” if one has the nerve to question his qualifications by reputation persona.

    McCain: Wrong On Everything…And Lying About It.

  • Fast Eddie

    says:

    Perhaps someone would like to follow up Corsi’s ‘Unfit For Command’ in 2004 with a 2008 McCain bio ‘Unable To Comprehend’.

  • libra

    says:

    There’s a very good reason Republicans have worked so aggressively to make this election a referendum on Obama — because if the campaign is about McCain, the Republicans will lose. Badly. — CB

    True, since McCain has between little and nothing to offer (other than POW! POW! Kaboom! POW!, that is).

    But it has also occurred to me that, somehow, Obama has been maneuvered into the role traditionally reserved for women: you have to prove to be twice as good as the next guy, to get half the pay he gets. Ie, the odds are against him what, 3:1? 4:1? (math ain’t my “shtick”, sorry to say). In some ways, it’s amazing that he can hold is own against McCain.

    One thing I’m hoping for is that all those college-age youngsters, now dispersed across the country on vacation or flipping burgers to pay for their cell-phones, will come back into the fray soon and as enthusiastic as before. Some fires need to be lit under our elderly butts 🙂

  • Democrat for McCain

    says:

    I was completely won over last night by McCain…I connected with him emotionally and was impressed with his knowledge, substance and heroism. I like Obama, but I feel he is not yet ready to be the leader of the free world (especially now with Russia acting up)….I think if Obama gets 8 more years of solid Senate experience he will be weathered and wise enough to lead with compassion AND strength.
    Jennifer Hartford CT

  • Plumb Bob

    says:

    There’s a very good reason Republicans have worked so aggressively to make this election a referendum on Obama

    OMFG! The have worked hard to make the election a referendum on Obama? The Repulibicans?

    The Democrats have been insisting on this — and they’ve been thrilled to have succeeded!

    Frank Rich gets the Whirling Top, Spin-Till-You-Drop spin award of the decade for this!

  • lenko

    says:

    Ted Sturgeon, noted sci-fi writer, came up with Sturgeon’s Law “Ninety percent of everything is crap.” Which is only another way of saying that only ten percent of ANYTHING is worth much, or thinks much, or knows much.

    You guys that post here (me too I hope) and your like on other sites — you’re the top ten percent. So we need to educate, and inform the ninety percent with the TRUTH, and that ain’t easy ‘cos the truth HURTS. Especially if it goes against what Daddy taught you, and what the TV injects into you everyday.

    Swimming uphill in treacle strikes me as easier.

  • Mark D

    says:

    There really is only one reason Obama isn’t trouncing McCain at this point:

    The media doesn’t want it that way.

    If the race is close, they’re hoping more people will tune in so they can rake in the advertising dollars.

    And the way to keep it close is to drum up false controversies and issues with the front runner, while ignoring the NUMEROUS mistakes, flat-out lies, idiocy, and lack of coherence of McCain.

    Add in the media’s typographical/commentarial fellatio of McCain and his Mavericky Maverickness, and we have what we have: A race that is closer than it would be in a sane world.

    And just think of how much worse it’d be without the Internet’s ability to fact check in seconds …

    **shudders**