Will it be enough?
Joepistole said:
.... take a look at the move Top Gun again.
I thought I'd jump on this one before anyone laughs too hard. I admit, on the surface, that seems an incredibly silly line. But it's not necessarily an empty point.
This weekend I found myself in the middle of an insubstantial yet amusing discussion of the presidential race, and sure enough,
Top Gun came up. Before
Top Gun, we called mavericks "rebels". And in either case, the concept has a certain romantic flair about it that people seem to crave. Tom Cruise's character in the film was young, cute, and nearly incoherent. But "Mav" became the archetype for the maverick. Similarly, it seems that James Dean—young, cute, and nearly incoherent—served for decades as the archetype of the rebel.
John McCain is not young. He is not cute. But he
is, at least to some, nearly incoherent. In this case, the incoherence works against him.
Take a look at Sarah Palin. She is (comparatively) young. Apparently she is not just cute but
hot. And she is nearly entirely incoherent.
While McCain's brand of incoherence and belligerence seems to have worked against him in the polls, the "cute"—as such—maverick, Palin, by some measures, is hitting the ball out of the park. Rich Lowry, editor of the conservative
National Review, is captivated:
I'm sure I'm not the only male in America who, when Palin dropped her first wink, sat up a little straighter on the couch and said, "Hey, I think she just winked at me." And her smile. By the end, when she clearly knew she was doing well, it was so sparkling it was almost mesmerizing. It sent little starbursts through the screen and ricocheting around the living rooms of America. This is a quality that can't be learned; it's either something you have or you don't, and man, she's got it.
(
Lowry)
For conservatives like Lowry, Palin's constant retreats to energy policy, oft-awkward evasions, preference glossy but insubstantial talking points, and open hostility to any sense of formality—for these are the chief criticisms of her performance in the debate against Sen. Joe Biden—are a fresh dose of what America really needs.
So striking was her debate performance that former theater critic Frank Rich—whose columns for the
New York Times are, undoubtedly, heaped on the Obama bandwagon—wrote over the weekend,
Sarah Palin's post-Couric/Fey comeback at last week’s vice presidential debate was a turning point in the campaign. But if she "won," as her indulgent partisans and press claque would have it, the loser was not Joe Biden. It was her running mate. With a month to go, the 2008 election is now an Obama-Palin race — about "the future," as Palin kept saying Thursday night — and the only person who doesn’t seem to know it is Mr. Past, poor old John McCain.
(
Rich)
This transformation seems inevitable. From the moment of her introduction as the Republican vice-presidential nominee, Sarah Palin has been viewed specifically in the harsh light of a potential inheritor of the presidency. Indeed, much of Rich's column focused on McCain's health, and up to the point of absurdity:
Now McCain is looking increasingly shaky, whether he’s repeating his “Miss Congeniality” joke twice in the same debate or speaking from notecards even when reciting a line for (literally) the 17th time (“The fundamentals of our economy are strong”) or repeatedly confusing proper nouns that begin with S (Sunni, Shia, Sudan, Somalia, Spain). McCain’s “dismaying temperament,” as George Will labeled it, only thickens the concerns. His kamikaze mission into Washington during the bailout crisis seemed crazed. His seething, hostile debate countenance — a replay of Al Gore’s sarcastic sighing in 2000 — didn’t make the deferential Obama look weak (as many Democrats feared) but elevated him into looking like the sole presidential grown-up.
(ibid)
Rich spent paragraphs considering an occasion back in May in which, instead of releasing his health records to the public, Sen. McCain "allowed a select group of 20 reporters to spend a mere three hours examining (but not photocopying) 1,173 pages of the candidate's health records". Rich laments that Dr. Lawrence Altman, a colleague at the
New York Times was not invited. Altman, Rich explains, "canvassed melanoma experts" about the data they did see in the file, and the response was that the information was "too 'unclear' to determine McCain's cancer prognosis". Additionally, while CNN's celebrity doctor Sanjay Gupta said that he was reasonably sure there was no "smoking gun" about McCain's health, Rich submarines that assertion by pointing out that Gupta wrote nary a word on the senator's psychological condition.
Quite clearly, Democrats and liberals are all too happy to have this election become a contest between Sen. Barack Obama and Gov. Palin. Not only does this reinforce the increasing irrelevance of the presidential candidate, Sen. McCain, whom
Obama described over the weekend as "out of touch, out of ideas, and running out of time", but in thrusting Palin to the fore, Democrats and their supporters hope to capitalize on what they perceive as clumsy folksiness painted to cover an abyss of empty rhetoric. They seem to think the Palin selection has burned a bridge too far, and hope to reinforce in voters' minds that in times so dire as these—with war and economy posing grave questions about the future of the nation—a cute, incoherent maverick is simply not the right choice.
In other words, as McCain slips in the polls, and finding his initial debate performance of no help, Democrats have been happy to let Palin step up to the spotlight and do what they see as even more damage. According to
RealClearPolitics°, McCain is steadily losing support. Georgia has slipped from being a "solid" McCain state at a 15% margin to "leaning" in favor of the Republican ticket at an 8% difference. Meanwhile, Minnesota and New Hampshire, which were "leaning" toward the Democratic ticket, have become "solid" Obama states. The trend would appear to suggest the Republicans are still losing ground, despite their rave reviews of Palin's performance last week. Heading into this evening's debate, McCain faces a grim outlook. RCP estimates that the election, held today, would result in a 364-174 win for Obama, an 11-point decline for the Republicans over the last three days. And those eleven points come from Missouri, where McCain showed a slender 1.7% lead as late as Saturday. The Obama lead is a mere 0.3%, which means the Republican ticket may well still have Missouri; the difference is within any reasonable margin of error for polling. But Missouri and Indiana were the only two states polling in favor of McCain last week at less than a 10-point margin. The lead in Indiana has increased by three-tenths to 2.5%—again, a fluctuation well within a reasonable margin of error—but for the most part, McCain appears to be bleeding votes. North Carolina, a state that favored Obama in polling by less than 1%, has grown that lead to 1.5%. Again, margin of error comes into play, but viewed against the general trend, the increase in support for Obama may well reflect what is happening nationwide.
So McCain, who has become increasingly irrelevant in the last two weeks, owing in part to the mere fact of Palin's debate, but also to his own failure to soundly defeat Obama in his own debate, and to be sure, his erratic actions during the bailout vote, needs to re-establish for himself some stable ground, and the only way to do that would seem to be to mop the floor with the Democratic contender. This is highly unlikely. While it is possible that McCain can "win on points", as the boxing metaphor goes, it is up to Obama to allow himself to be knocked out.
Lacking that knockout, it is likely that McCain will remain a shadow of his own presidential bid, as the spotlight might well continue to focus on Sarah Palin. Indeed, the campaign cannot afford to sequester her away from the press. And in this case, the problem of being a maverick is that so far, like the
Top Gun precedent, Palin only has superficial tools to work with. Is being the political equivalent of eye candy enough not only to forgive her blatant superficiality, but also to germinate and grow the seeds of support among the independent bloc in order to harvest a victory in November?
____________________
Notes:
° according to RealClearPolitics — See prior analyses of RCP numbers:
Works Cited:
Lowry, Rich. "Projecting through the Screen". The Corner. October 3, 2008. http://corner.nationalreview.com/post/?q=NDYzMGFiNjQ0MWRjNmI0ZTlkYjgwZTExMjA3MWNiZTk=
Rich, Frank. "Pitbull Palin Mauls McCain". New York Times. October 4 ,2008. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/05/opinion/05rich.html
Seabrook, Andrea. "Gloves Coming Off in Campaign". All Things Considered. October 5, 2008. http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=95413817
"RealClearPolitics Electoral Map". RealClearPolitics.com. Viewed October 7, 2008. http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/maps/obama_vs_mccain/
