PRESIDENT OBAMA - October 30, 2008

If Republican John McCain wins on 4 November it will be a colossal upset. Long tradition, and the natural human impulse not to tempt Lady Fortune, both dictate that partisans should be cautious. Anything could happen, after all, and indeed anything can. But something already did happen: the financial crisis, federal bailout, and continuing stock market turmoil. So long as this dominates the national conversation – and it only has to dominate for another week – the presidential election is effectively Barack Obama's to lose. So far he has shown no indications of doing so. Obama's magic as a campaigner can be overstated, but his skill can scarcely be; he has made

very few missteps in the course of nearly two years of campaigning, and is unlikely to make a serious one now. 

The long term graph of Gallup's daily tracking poll, going back to the primary season, shows how the race has been transformed since September. Obama, whose narrow summer lead seemed to be stagnating on the eve of the Democratic Convention in August, got his expected convention bounce, then recovered quickly from McCain's equally expected convention bounce and the less expected early media fascination with vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin. Allowing for daily random fluctiuations in the tracking poll, Obama was already drifting back into a narrow lead on the eve of the financial meltdown. In the wake of the crisis, however, his margin has widened, and he now regularly polls above 50 percent, while McCain is around 42 percent.

This is a structural transformation in the race, a shifting of the underlying ground. 2008 was always going to be a tough year for the Republicans, saddled with an unpopular president and a series of embarrassments. The financial crisis converted rough ground into a steep uphill fight. Nevertheless McCain was competitive through the summer, even regaining the lead during his convention. But in the last few weeks it is hard to see how McCain's campaign has done his cause much good. In particular, while Sarah Palin generates more crowd enthusiasm at campaign events than McCain himself does, she is unpopular with independents, moderate Republicans – conspicuously Colin Powell – and even some conservatives. In the past few days, media reports of backbiting between Palin and McCain campaign staffers has been one more distraction (and a potent source of schadenfreude in the liberal blogosphere).

To US political junkies of a certain age, McCain's arguments on the stump have taken on a remarkably anachronistic flavor. 'Socialist' as a critique of the Democratic policy agenda has never fallen out of vogue in the internal dialog of the US right, but as a term of campaign invective it has the ring of a different era. This is the rhetoric I heard as a teenager in Southern California, in the heyday of the John Birch Society. By the 1970s, a few years later, it already sounded old-fashioned. To most voters of a younger generation, McCain could hardly be more archaic and opaque if he were calling Obama a Jacobin.

Of course McCain is not banking on voters of a younger generation. He is rallying the GOP base, predominantly older voters or those who have absorbed the internal language of the right. McCain is fighting to hold what he can and not be swamped, most starkly in the geography of the campaign. US presidential campaigns are not truly national; they are only actively contested in those states that might tip either way – this year, almost entirely states that have been reliably Republican. In the most literal terms the ground is shifting under the race.

Yet everything old is new again, and the GOP language of half a century ago may be the language of its future. McCain is preaching to the choir, but the choir perhaps intuitively understands – more than the Democrats yet do – how completely the financial meltdown and federal bailout have transformed not just the economic landscape but the ideological landscape. Faith in unfettered markets and deregulation, the dominant thread in US economic discussion since the 1970s, has been deeply compromised, not only by the crisis itself but by what it revealed about capitalism and particularly about capitalists: In an emergency they are as quick to seek a governmental bailout as anyone.

'Socialism' is an unlikely outcome, but the terms of economic debate have at least potentially shifted in far reaching ways. Unless McCain makes a stunning comeback, Republicans may find themselves not only largely out of power (Democratic gains are expected in both houses of Congress) but on the defensive on core economic policy questions to a degree they have not been in decades.

Rick Robinson

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Author of the article holds B.A. degree in Economics from the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA) and M.A. degree in English from California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, California . Mr. Robinson worked as a county-level campaigner in Dukakis (1988) and Clinton (1992) presidential campaigns. He presently works as a journalist and political commentator.

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