Faithful Democrats
When Sarah Palin claimed snidely that she’s been listening to Joe Biden’s speeches since she “was, like, in 2nd grade,” she was clearly lying. Does anyone honestly believe that Palin has ever listened to a Biden speech? Or can anyone take seriously her insistence to Katie Couric she wasn’t mocking Biden but was innocently pointing out a fact in a value-neutral way? But set that aside. More importantly, what this and other incidents have made increasingly clear is that the McCain campaign, for all its stunts and faux forcefulness, simply isn’t about anything. Like Seinfeld, the McCain campaign is a show about nothing.
One minute they’re hitting Obama’s inexperience, the next they’re poking Biden for exactly the opposite. One minute they’re deregulators, the next they’re angry populists. One minute they’re making brash statements about Georgia and Spain and Pakistan, the next they’re slamming Obama for using imprudent words on foreign policy. They always shed some crocodile tears and make a big show of their ostensible anger at Obama. But they’re just not consistent enough to be taken seriously. They have a gap not only between words and deeds, but also between some words and other words. And that’s a problem for a campaign that’s trying to convince people that it puts “country first.”
McCain is only down by a few points, so I’m sure his team thinks they could win this thing. And maybe, with the use of a little fear-mongering, they’ll manage to get just enough voters to decide they can’t pull the lever for Obama. But my sense is that at the end of the day, voters will know that Obama is the candidate who’ll bring change, and they won’t know what the McCain-Palin ticket is going to bring.
And that, as much as anything, is why I think Obama is going to win.
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