For a while during the post-Palin euphoria, more than a few Republicans thought the presidential race was breaking their way. And then, as September progressed, the boom faded and Obama retook the lead in several polls. Now, the Democratic road to the needed 270 electoral votes looks a little easier than the Republican one. There’s a lot of road ahead, but you would have to look far and wide to find a voice on the Right foolhardy enough to declare, “Oh yeah, this one’s in the bag.”
It’s possible Obama wins. Probable, even.
Like all races, this campaign has come down to a lot of “if-then” statements. “If you elect my opponent, then you will not get real change in Washington.” “If you elect my opponent, then your taxes will go up.” Each side is trying to paint a vivid picture of dire consequences.
Lately, the Democrats have had an easier time doing this. One of the reasons Republicans got “thumped” in 2006 was that all their failures were prominent and fresh in voters’ minds: casualties in Iraq with no sign of stable government taking root, Katrina devastating New Orleans, Jack Abramoff’s ties to too many lawmakers. Some of the scandals would have seemed unrealistic and clichéd had they appeared in a novel — Mark Foley soliciting house pages, the FBI raiding Curt Weldon’s home, Don Sherwood facing allegations of choking his mistress.
Now as in that election, vast swaths of the voting public have little or no memory of Democratic failures. When McCain tried to respond to the “third term of George W. Bush” talking point by alleging that Obama would be Carter’s second term, the conventional wisdom was that the jab wouldn’t resonate with the public at large, because not enough Americans remember Jimmy Carter.
Sure, in the early Clinton administration — the last time Democrats controlled the presidency and both houses — they passed the biggest tax increase in history, failed to pass health-care legislation, failed to reform welfare, pulled troops out of Somalia in the face of a foe that resembled extras from Mad Max, and focused the arsenal of democracy’s attention on Haiti, of all places. The surgeon general declared she wanted schools to teach teenage boys how to masturbate. But people forget about yesterday’s problems.
Since 1994, Democrats have been able to say, “our ideas would work perfectly, if we could just get it past those obstructionists standing in our way!” Their ads have chanted it, their cheerleaders in the media have echoed it, and their base fervently believes it. Yet next to nothing on their policy agenda is new or different from the last time around — the government can institute a health-care system that will take care of everyone, and higher taxes on the rich will cover all the costs; industry is polluting the earth and we can solve it by taxing carbon; we’ll stop Republicans from destroying Social Security; we can expand the good work of volunteerism by throwing massive federal funding at those programs.
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