McCain-Dole 1996

The McCain campaign has now pulled off its first major tactical victory of the 2008 campaign. Barack Obama's acceptance speech, delivered Thursday night before a TV audience larger than that for the Olympics' opening ceremony, was by Friday morning blown off the news by the wall-to-wall who-will-it-be speculation, and it has largely monopolized the headlines since. On the basis of execution alone, it was an absolutely perfect operation that suggests Team McCain's morale and confidence are very high.

One of the greatest challenges McCain has faced is simply getting the media to pay attention and take his campaign seriously. The attitude among observers has, since Iowa voted, been that whoever won the Democratic primary would win in November, and this sense has only increased in certainty as the actual polling gap between the actual candidates has narrowed to within the margin of error.

I find this reminescent in some ways of 1996, when Bob Dole ran against Bill Clinton, and selected Jack Kemp as his running mate. Dole, like McCain, was not seen as a True Believer by the diehard conservative wing of the party and a bit mushy on economic issues, while Kemp was a hero to the Reagan restorationists for his supply-side leadership. Dole needed, at the very least, to shore up that base, and to shake up the dynamic of a race that everyone agreed he was sure to lose. Kemp did mildly inspire the policy-wonk right, but Clinton maintained control of the narrative even as the polls kept narrowing.

While we remember Clinton as popular today, in 1996 he had both a hostile congress and a pissed-off base (from welfare reform and the collapse of HillaryCare) to contend with, and the economy was only beginning to hit its stride. Dole was a solid candidate who represented almost everything Bill Clinton wasn't, and Ross Perot's role would be that of the joker rather than the spoiler he played four years before. But, Clinton was loved by the commentariat, Matt Drudge was still two years away from his big break, and Rush Limbaugh was the closest thing to an alternative media.

Today the story will play out differently. Palin's selection has met with near-universal acclaim by the base, many (if not most) of whom felt deeply ambivalent about McCain. Unlike Kemp though, Palin may prove effective at expanding into many purple areas. I'm suprised I've heard so little talk about New Hampshire, which has been largely assumed to be in Obama's bag, let alone Wisconsin, Minnesota, or Michigan. Yes, she is a pro-life evangelical, but she is not a rich Southern male pro-life evangelical.

Moreover, by talking up how inexperienced she is, commentators are creating an enormous opportunity for her to exceed expectations by merely maintaining the degree of competence she showed in her acceptance speech in Friday. And if you watched with the sound turned off, she displayed enormous physical confidence, which is interesting because it is so much harder to fake. Camille Paglia watched it and said, "We may be seeing the first female president... I am reeling."

We are still just beginning the bottom of the first inning. I believe Palin will prove to be substantive where substance matters, and that the ever-elusive undecided voters will wait to see her in action to make their minds up. But in pure tactical terms, she's been an unalloyed victory for the campaign.

Only in America

Just when you start to worry that the country is being taken over by Ivy League lawyers and I-bankers, the son of two generations of admirals chooses a small-town beauty queen who once worked on a fishing boat and married an Eskimo snowmobile-racing champion, to run alongside him for the Presidency.

And of course, on the other side, we have Barack Obama, a deeply-flawed candidate whose loss I look forward to greatly, but whose rise nonetheless represents the promise of America at its very best.

Bourgeois Liberalism Defined

From an article on a Seattle initiative that bans parking and traffic in one neighborhbood every week to encourage a car-free lifestyle, comes this gem:

"I think it promotes awareness of whatever we're promoting awareness of," said resident Thomas Hubbard.

I think that Comrade Hubbard would do well as a cadre in North Korea, where when one is asked to give his opinion on the outcome of the Third Plenary Session of the People's Commitee on the Dialectic, his life depends on not answering the question in the clearest possible terms.

Living History

Is it just me, or does this IHT article seem to be trying to create an alternate history? Writing about when Joe Biden and Barack Obama first crossed paths, it reads:

The two became colleagues upon Obama's entry to the Senate in 2005 and his appointment to the Foreign Relations Committee. Obama was perhaps best known at the time for opposing military action in Iraq.

Biden, who had opposed the Persian Gulf War in 1991, worked in 2002 with the committee's ranking Republican member, Senator Richard Lugar of Indiana, on a resolution that would authorize action to remove weapons of mass destruction in Iraq - but not to remove President Saddam Hussein. The White House opposed the idea, which floundered; Biden ultimately voted for the war resolution that Obama opposed.

But this is awfully muddy, isn't it, considering that Biden cast a vote as a Senator, while Obama opposed the resolution the same way your Aunt Minnie and the local junior college faculty association did? It really seems written so as to elevate to historical fact the supposition that, were he a senator like Kerry, Clinton, and Biden were at the time, Obama would have voted "Nay." Of course he might have--it's not that hard to imagine--but the point is he wasn't there when it counted.

If you've ever played a friendly game of quarter-ante poker that wanders into that bad part of town where hundreds start changing hands, you've seen how people's judgment changes as the stakes grow. Some grow calmer and more focused, others become irrational and panic, but everyone plays differently when it's for keeps. If the reporters don't see that, or don't think it applies here--then they're buffoons. Otherwise this is really quite a nefarious bit of ideation.