The candidacy of Barack Obama has been most often portrayed by an enthralled national media corps as an uplifting gospel revival meeting, dedicated to hope and change. And so it is. But Team Obama has also displayed a willingness to press any advantage in the service of its ultimate goal: winning. So the fact that the campaign had a high-quality 13-minute video in the can portraying John McCain's involvement in the Keating 5 banking scandal of a generation ago should hardly be surprising to anyone who has been paying attention to Obama since last year. The man consistently hits back as hard as possible, and he is totally unafraid to go negative.
Now, I know we're all supposed to be singing from the same hymnal on the left these days - the positive plans of the Obama-Biden juggernaut and all that , the change brand - but I'm breaking ranks. To this Democrat, used to suffering through disastrous election nights in the full knowledge that the results will further ruin his country, Obama's instinct to go for the vicious final punch, the head-snapping lights out political blow, is a thing of beauty.
Senator Obama knows that Senator McCain is on the ropes and reeling. Virtually tied until the wheels came off the American economic system after years of debt worship, McCain-Palin has many Republicans looking for the exits and talking about rebuilding their movement. But he is not content to let McCain fade, or to allow his opposing campaign to trot out a series of lame attacks - really, Bill Ayers is gonna change this election?! - without using every weapon at his disposal.
Besides, the stakes are big and the reward expansive for going negative in the last month. The entire conservative movement is ripe for dividing into rival camps - the social/religious camp versus the so-called economic conservatives. Huge majorities in Congress beckon. A sharp national turn to the left - the next New Deal - is lurking in the eaves.
Howard Wolfson posited in the New Republic that this election is as good as over. I'm inclined to agree. and he's got the stakes entirely in focus:
The economy is simply bigger than the rogues gallery that John McCain is conjuring up.
Why is this? Why won't the swiftboat tactics work this year?
Its easy to lose sight of it in the day to day coverage, but the collapse of Wall Street in the last weeks was a seminal event in the history of our nation and our politics. To put the crisis in perspective, Americans have lost a combined 1 trillion dollars in net worth in just the last four weeks alone. Just as President Bush's failures in Iraq undermined his party's historic advantage on national security issues, the financial calamity has shown the ruinous implications of the Republican mania for deregulation and slavish devotion to totally unfettered markets.
Republicans and Democrats have been arguing over the proper role of government for a century. In 1980 voters sided with Ronald Reagan and Republicans that government had become too big and intrusive. Then the economy worked in the Republicans' favor. Today the pendulum has swung in our direction. Republican philosophies have been discredited by events. Voters understand this. This is a big election about big issues. McCain's smallball will not work. This race will not be decided by lipsticked pigs. And John McCain can not escape that reality. The only unknowns are the size of the margin and the breadth of the Democratic advantage in the next Congress.
So keep hitting, Barack - even if they're bleeding.
UPDATE: Jim Wolcott must have been posting just as I was, on a similar wavelength - so I have to quote him:
My rooting interest is less about Obama himself than about how big a hurt he can put to the Republican Party. I don't want the Republican Party simply defeated in November, I want to see it smashed beyond all recognition, in such wriggling, writhing, anguished disarray that it can barely reconstitute itself, so desperate for answers that it looks to Newt Gingrich for visionary guidance, his wisdom and insight providing the perfect cup of hemlock to finish off the conservative movement for good so that it can rot in the salted earth of memory unmissed and unmourned in toxic obscurity.
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