In the span of only a single tumultuous month, the entire landscape of the election has been transformed. Following the Republican National Convention, John McCain found himself enjoying his first lead in the popular vote since before the end of the primaries and basking in the meteoric glow of his new lieutenant. The two were able to finagle victories on the issues of offshore drilling and the Surge, and amidst all the flying rhetoric, it seemed that the GOP might grab yet another election from the jaws of defeat. The battle cry was sounded, and the base, as they say, was energized.
But now, only a month later, the senator finds himself in a dark political wasteland: he has earned himself an insurmountable deficit in the polls, an even larger massacre scheduled for the Republicans in Congress, an economy rushing swiftly toward bankruptcy, and a running mate whose hypocrisy and utter ineptness have embarrassed her into silence. In short, I can only reiterate a position of mine from about six months ago: Senator Obama will almost certainly win, probably by about five points.
Mind you, the GOP hasn't exactly been left shaking its head, just trying to understand this sudden spate of misfortune; they already know what happened. Kathleen Parker certainly does, as does Karl Rove. This recent rapid erosion of support was not simply a natural abatement of euphoria following the RNC, but rather, a distinct and discrete phenomenon. In my reckoning, the blame can be approximately divided down the middle: half for Sarah Palin, half for the economy.
The economy's role is obvious: when a country's finances go south, the sitting bureaucrats always take the blame. The fault on the side of the governor, however, yields more tragedy, because it could have been so easily mitigated.
Troopergate is a good example: the controversy rests entirely on the fact that she shouldn't have used every avenue available to her to rescue her family and the public from an armed, psychopathic civil servant. (Whether or not this is actually a fair appraisal makes little difference, because a base credulous enough to accept her at face value usually doesn't bother to beleaguer how issues come to be framed.) But since she was evasive, disingenuous, and outright obstructive about it, rather than being given an overwhelmingly sympathetic and charitable response by the public at large she is going to be left only with some kind of ethics demerit.
Her aloofness with the mainstream media is another: she has tried to paint their obviously innocuous behavior as “gotcha” journalism, and thanks to Tina Fey and Saturday Night Live, has managed to become a literal self-parody in the process. Her lack of intellectual curiosity is stunning—this is a woman who could not name a single Supreme Court case with which she disagreed, and who seemed unaware of the particulars of the Bush Doctrine, the overarching philosophy that has for the past decade guided the foreign policy of her own party. And she seems unable to answer even the simplest questions in a straightforward way; one must ask, when an interviewer asks which newspapers one reads or has read, what kind of person answers, without irony, “all of them?”
She did, of course, channel a few badly needed volts through the far-right base—which I'll admit I simply didn't predict—and they continue steadfastly optimistic. But thankfully, her idiocy has not gone uncondemned, and in pandering to the gullible, anti-intellectual faction of the electorate, McCain and Palin are not only losing, but losing for all the right reasons.
