REPUBLICANS are concerned that John McCain’s presidential campaign is running
on empty populist rhetoric now that a postconvention bounce in the polls
provided by the selection of Sarah Palin as his running mate is over.
The White House race has entered a new phase with Republicans and Democrats
vying to be “prolier-than-thou” in their appeal to working people.
Palin, the governor of Alaska, still thrills the crowds, but the cultural war
unleashed by the moose-hunting hockey mom has led some conservatives to
wonder whether the savaging of America’s snooty, overeducated liberal
“elite” has gone too far.
McCain’s attack on Wall Street “greed and corruption” and call for greater
regulation in response to last week’s financial crisis has added to concerns
about the tenor of his campaign. A Wall Street Journal editorial warned that
he would “never beat Obama by running as an angry populist like Al Gore,
circa 2000”.
McCain was caught out yesterday arguing in a health magazine for deregulating
the health insurance industry in the same way as banking, a gift to Barack
Obama’s campaign.
But the Democrat is also under fire from his own side for failing to press
home a clear economic message that will convince working-class voters he is
one of them, instead of the wine-drinking, rocket salad-eating,
pointy-headed elitist of Republican legend.
“What we’re seeing in both campaigns is a fierce determination to win and that
principles don’t matter,” said Heather Mac Donald, an influential thinker at
the free market Manhattan Institute. “There is a lot of populist
demagoguery.”
McCain began last week by claiming the “fundamentals” of the American economy
were strong but ended it as a raging champion of the “worker” against the
fat cats backing Obama, such as Jim Johnson, the former head of Fannie Mae,
the troubled mortgage giant, who led the Democratic candidate’s search for a
vice-president. Obama, in turn, accused McCain of being “a little panicked
right now” and claimed his “big solution for the economic crisis was to
blame me for it”.
“Now he tells us that he’s the one who will take on the ‘ol boys’ network’,”
Obama scoffed. “In the McCain campaign, that’s called a staff meeting.” His
campaign went on to release a list of 26 McCain advisers and fundraisers
involved in lobbying Fannie Mae and its sister company, Freddie Mac.
In the middle of this war of words, Palin, 44, has been cramming on economic
and foreign policy with McCain’s advisers. She is to be introduced to
foreign leaders by McCain at the United Nations general assembly in New York
on Tuesday. However, her lack of experience is being touted by the McCain
campaign as a qualification for office in itself – the ultimate proof that
she is a maverick and Washington outsider.
For others, it has reinforced fears that the Republican party under McCain has
lost its moorings. “The implosion of anger against anyone – heaven forbid –
being elite or having experience that isn’t moose-hunting makes me
uncomfortable,” Mac Donald said. “There is no question that I would have
preferred someone with business experience in the White House.”
George Will, a leading conservative commentator, compared Palin’s new-found
celebrity to that of a winner of American Idol, the television show, and
predicted the nation’s romance with her would soon cool. “The world is a
sweeter place because Sarah Palin has increased the quantity of love, but
this is not a reliable foundation for John McCain’s campaign,” he warned.
The battle for white, working-class voters and “Wal-Mart moms” is being fought
in the economically depressed industrial and farming swing states of the
Midwest, where the election is likely to be decided.
In Wisconsin, which John Kerry won for the Democrats by 0.4%, the narrowest
margin of the 2004 election, the two campaigns are fighting on the same
turf.
McCain and Palin spoke together – as they almost always do nowadays to boost
McCain’s crowds – at a rally for 12,000 people at an ice hockey stadium in
Green Bay, an industrial meat-packing town. Tomorrow, Obama will hold his
own rally at the same venue. The air-waves are flooded with political
advertisements from both camps. The most recent poll shows Obama leading
McCain in Wisconsin by just 1%.
A paper mill near Green Bay is about to close with the loss of 600 jobs. A
General Motors car plant in Wisconsin laid off 1,000 workers this year.
“I’m very worried about the economy,” said Maria Blahnik, a retired nurse.
“I’ve got four sons and I told them we’re going to have to tighten our
belts. Our kids don’t know how to. They’ve never been through tough times.”
But she was cheered by the selection of Palin and had no doubt she was up to
the job.
“I love Sarah. She’s already proved that she can do it all. I love it that she
is a hockey mom. My husband and his friends have put a picture of her in
their hunting cabin. They’ve normally got pin-ups of girls with big boobs
there and instead they’ve got Sarah. Isn’t that fun?”
In Wisconsin, the crowd waved green and yellow balloons, the colours of the
American football team the Green Bay Packers, as Palin began to speak. On
this occasion, she finally dropped the claim that she had stopped a
so-called “bridge to nowhere” in Alaska after it was revealed that she
supported the project until it became a shameful national symbol of waste.
There was applause, too, for her husband Todd Palin. His lawyer announced that
the self-styled “first dude” would defy a subpoena from the state of Alaska
to testify in the so-called Troopergate case – an investigation into whether
Sarah Palin tried to sack the chief of police over a family feud with her
brother-in-law.
The inquiry is now unlikely to proceed until after the election, despite
Palin’s offer to let the public “hold me accountable”.
Republican activists were not bothered. There was no doubt that Palin was a
bigger attraction than McCain, although on this occasion she remembered to
refer to the “McCain and Palin” ticket. She got it the wrong way around at
an earlier gathering prompting jokes that the “black widow” of Alaska was
already elbowing the 72-year-old Arizona senator out of the top spot.
However, a stream of reports questioning her status as a reformer – she ran up
as much as $27m in requests for much-despised congressional spending as
mayor of the small town of Wasilla – has taken a toll on her popularity. A
national poll last week by Quinnipiac showed Obama leading McCain among
women voters by 54 to 40 points.
One Republican from Green Bay, who did not wish to be named, said the
pregnancy of Palin’s daughter Bristol, 17, remained an unacknowledged
problem. “There’s a lot of grumbling about this teenage pregnancy thing. If
she can’t take care of her daughter, how can she take care of the country?”
she said.
Her concern is shared by Mac Donald. “Sarah Palin has obvious political
charisma and she might win the election for the Republicans, but at great
cost to conservative principles. The debate from now on about family values
is going to be extremely complicated.”
Palin’s rapturous reception at the Republican national convention and angry
denunciations of “sexism” initially stifled this discussion. But Mac Donald
believes her selection has wider implications.
“It’s going to be difficult to speak in a more straightforward manner about
the devastating impact of teen pregnancy. It is amazing to me that
conservative pundits have thrown aside their principles in order to justify
her pick,” she said.
She also wondered about Palin’s ability to juggle the demands of the
vice-presiden-cy with the needs of her children, including Trig, her
five-month-old Down’s syndrome baby. “She could be in the middle of a
crisis or a terrorist attack that could take her attention for months. You
can’t say, ‘I’ve changed my mind, I need time off with my kids’.”
Mac Donald is considering voting for Obama, even though she fears he is also
underqualified. “I go back and forth on it. I would not rule it out,” she
said.
In the short term, the financial instability has benefited Obama, returning
him to the top of the polls by an average of 1.9 points, according to
Real-ClearPolitics. The most recent Gallup tracking poll showed him surging
into a five-point lead, his strongest showing since a brief bounce after the
Democratic national convention in August.
In Wisconsin, Susan Edwards, 26, a member of the food workers’ union, said: “I
really think the election is going to come back to the economy. A lot of
people liked Sarah Palin’s flashiness, but there is not a lot behind it.”
Some Democrats are concerned that Obama has the same problem. In a withering
article in The Democratic Strategist, a political journal, William Galston,
a former White House policy adviser, complained in an open letter to Obama
that few if any voters could cite a single economic proposal of his.
“I’ll get right to the point,” he wrote. “You are in danger of squandering an
election most of us thought was unlosable. The reason is simple: on the
electorate’s most important concern – the economy – you have no clear
message, and John McCain has filled the void with his own.”
Obama called for an economic stimulus package for working families and said he
would stick to proposals for middle-class tax cuts. However, he said he
would delay his own plans for a financial rescue package until he had heard
what the Bush administration proposed.
“You don’t do it in a day,” he added in measured tones. “We’d better do it in
an intelligent, systematic, thoughtful fashion. I’m much less interested in
scoring political points than I am in making sure we have a structure in
place that is actually going to work.”
McCain had no such inhibitions, saying that Obama was “right square in the
middle” of the culture of lobbying – despite his own heavy reliance on
lobbyists to advise his campaign. He unveiled a punchy new slogan: “That’s
not country first, that’s Obama first.”
Thomas Frank, the author of What’s the Matter with Kansas?, an influential
account of conservative populism, said the Republicans were engaging in
class and cultural warfare.
“It is pure opportunism,” he said. “There is no way John McCain can pretend to
be an economic populist. He’s always been a deregulator. But when the
economy is as bad as it is, the Republicans have to go to cultural war,
because it is the only way they can win.” The importance of Palin, he added,
was that “she is McCain’s proxy cultural warrior. She’s really good at it.
She’s phenomenal”.
American voters will get the chance to show their approval or disapproval on
November 4. Cindy Smith, 52, the owner of a furniture shop, said after
attending the rally in Wisconsin: “It’s not my grandmother’s party any more.
We’re a lot more liberal than in her day.” She did not mind a bit.
