Paul Krugman links to this chart from Nate Silver and quotes Silver as follows.
Although Barack Obama remains a slight favorite in this election, his position is more vulnerable than at any point since the primaries concluded, and he no longer appears to have a built-in strength in the electoral college that we had attributed to him before.
From Obama's highpoint on June 19th, there are two turns downward and one flat period. The first downward tilt is on June 19th, when his ascent turned into a descent, and the second was on July 31st, where his descent accelerated. During mid to late July, Obama's lead flattened out before taking another downturn.
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| Let's go to the calendar and his first downturn. Well, he had just won the primary and was on a post-primary bounce, so some slippage was inevitable. Still, what happened around June 19th? The campaign introduced Obama with a national ad buy, but what people were paying attention to was Obama's announced support for the FISA compromise. Two days earlier, he had changed his position on NAFTA. On June 26, he agreed with the Supreme Court on expanding the death penalty to non-capital offenses and shifted on guns. This reinforced narrative about his lack of principle led to charges of flip-flopping and the first sustained negative narrative about his candidacy.
He was able to arrest this slide during mid to late July, which corresponds to his trip to Europe. It showed up in Gallup's tracking poll; clearly Americans liked a President as leader of the free world, respected by people around the world. The McCain's whiny responses and xenophobia didn't work.
Unfortunately, Obama not only resumed his slide, but it accelerated around the end of July. What happened? I bet you can predict it - McCain's celebrity ad was released on July 31. The celebrity ad with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears was not the first negative attack by McCain, it was just the first attack that really resonated. The Georgia-Russia situation, with McCain acting like the President throwing out empty but harsh rhetoric only reinforced the narrative that Obama is a lightweight.
I didn't think it was possible to lose this election for this simple reason.
Obama still has this large structural advantage, so there's no reason to panic (not that panic is ever a good response), and there are two key lessons here that Markos puts in his new book - Obama needs to reinforce his narrative and he needs to define McCain as a villain.
Obama's vision of the Presidency as a moral leader who can get millions to listen is powerful and persuasive to Americans, just as McCain's vision of the Presidency as warrior-in-chief also resonates strongly. The lack of response to the Georgia situation, along with bellicosity from neoliberals like Dick Holbrooke (and even Barack Obama himself) only reinforces McCain's narrative. If the question is who is the better warrior-in-chief, Obama loses.
McCain has so far successfully defined Obama as a lightweight, but this built on the narrative that Obama himself cut against with his capitulation on NAFTA, FISA, guns, and the death penalty. Obama hurt his own brand, as Larry Lessig noted with his term 'self-swift boating'. Obama needs to get it back by standing on something powerful, probably energy-related or maybe on national security. He needs a gas tax holiday type situation, where he stands up to the mob and reinforces his change brand.
At the same time, he needs to define McCain as the politics of the past. So far, most of his arguments have basically said that being negative is the politics of the past. It's not. People like bitchy gossip, they will always like bitchy gossip. And being negative is not the same thing as being dishonest. The politics of the past is what he's doing in Georgia, which is to ratchet up rhetoric and act like a crazy old man who always wants to start wars. A straight up confrontation that reinforces McCain's rash bellicosity, something Americans understand as very Bush-like, would be very powerful in terms of turning McCain's brand away into something that means crazy and Republican.
What McCain did with his negative campaign was smart - he floated a bunch of commercials until he hit a theme that resonated. The Obama campaign should try that, experiment a bit with commercials that go at McCain from a few different angles. Pick up and run with the one that hits, just like McCain did with his follow-on celebrity ads.
Obama's brand is progressive. When he refuses to run as a progressive, he loses ground. This should not be a surprise. |
