The Reality-Based Community Returns To Life

Then, of course, Palin ended the debate by celebrating how cool these ‘real’ moments are, when she could speak directly to the American people without the ‘filter’ of the press. So subtle, eh? Now we’re all supposed to not be surprised when she declines to be available for press conferences because that whole question-and-answer thing is filtering her relationship with god-fearing Americans who prefer their talk straight. Never mind that the evil press was actually kind enough to filter out – not in – the most embarrassing moments of her cringe-fests with Gibson and Couric.

Sigh. Such is the state of American politics in 2008.

In all of this, there’s bad news, good news and better news. The bad news is that Palin has very likely managed to become a rising figure for years to come in American politics. All she has to do now is hold out for four or five weeks without being further exposed as knowing nothing about the issues people care about, lose the election along with McCain, and then spend the next three years studying up so that she can join the big league bullshitters on the campaign trail in 2012. She’d have a decent shot at winning the nomination at that point, although the GOP nomination for president may be even more worthless in four years than it is now. Of course, if McCain somehow wins this election, Palin would be running at some point as a sitting vice president. In either scenario, don’t even get me started on what a depressing barometer this is for the state of the American polity. This is an ambitious former sportscaster (literally) and beauty pageant contestant (also literally), with all the genuine sincerity of a junior high pep rally ("Go Team! Beat Other Team!"). Do I really, gulp, live in a country where the likes of Sarah Palin are seriously considered for the highest office in the land?

That’s the bad news. The good news is that Palin’s avoidance of self-immolation during the debate didn’t do her any good apart from engineering her tenuous survival, and it didn’t do the McCain ticket any good either. Most viewers thought she lost the debate, hands-down, and continue to believe she is not prepared to be vice president. Perhaps there is some hope, after all.

More importantly, every key indicator now shows McCain in free-fall over the last weeks. He is polling anywhere from four to eleven points behind Obama, depending on the survey you look at. Moreover, the smart money – which is literally what it is – at Intrade now is betting on Obama with 68 to 32 percent favorability odds. Several weeks ago McCain actually led by a few points in that ratio. Now he’s getting clobbered. Most importantly, of course, is the Electoral College map, which is now squeezing McCain like a Brooklyn loan shark. If the vote were held today, state-by-state polls show Obama taking 338 electoral votes (with 270 necessary to win the presidency) to McCain’s 185, a royal trouncing. The four mid-large swing states that generally hold the key to any modern presidential election – Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida – have all turned blue, to the point where McCain has even thrown in the towel and exited Michigan. Likewise, the key swing states from the next size tier down – New Hampshire, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada – are also now polling blue, every one of them.

Remarkably, even Virginia is now leaning in favor of Obama. And, by the way, that 338-185 tally leaves 15 electoral votes unaccounted for. These belong to North Carolina, now in a statistical dead heat. North Carolina! How bad is a GOP candidate hurting when he’s fighting to stay alive in North Carolina, home of decades-long senator from the paleolithic, Jesse Helms?

This means that, barring an October Surprise or something of the same magnitude, Obama will be the next president, perhaps by a considerable margin (and, coupled with congressional gains for Democrats, in what may be a landmark election). Unfortunately, the McCain campaign knows this too. He has so far demonstrated his willingness to do or say anything to win the presidency, and that will certainly be the agenda of the next month, as the aspersions regarding Obama’s past associations are going to be trotted out in what history might come to refer to as Rove’s Last Stand.

The question – still very much unanswered, for my money – is whether Obama has the stones and the smarts to parry with trailer trash. He has to frame and innoculate, so that every time McCain goes south it only hurts the shipper, not the receiver. The killer line that Obama has to pull out at the appropriate moment in the next debate, spoken with a hint of kind sorrowfulness, is this: "You know, John, lately it seems like you’ll say or do anything to win the presidency". Those sixteen words would seal the election for good and for permanent. They will resonate with the public and the press, who already agree with that sentiment, they will destroy what is still McCain’s most potent weapon – the myth of his good character – and they will disarm him from being able to use the last remaining arrows in his quiver without having them turn into boomerangs. One sentence, and it will be game over. This would be the "You’re no John Kennedy" of 2008.

If Obama can do that, and if he can win this election, especially resoundingly, the even better news may be that regressive politics are buried for a generation. Stupidly, Democrats and mainstream liberals have refused to fight a battle against a wholly and manifestly failed complete ideological package. Thus, they have left the high ground of framing to the right, they have been forced into a rear-guard independent skirmish on every issue, and they have failed to articulate a coherent alternative world view.

Maybe that is a task for after the election, though I have a hard time seeing Democrats ever being that smart or that gutty.

And Obama has been absolutely emblematic of that tendency. What does he stand for, other than not being Bush? I see little beyond vague platitudes and a promise to return to better times. If he wins, it will have been largely by being tactically smart and strategically too coy by half, standing safely still and allowing the regressive alternative to implode before our very eyes.

A win is a win, of course. But if, after eight years of George W. Bush, two failed wars, Hurricane Katrina, massive debt, torture, incompetence and corruption – if after all that you still need a hundred-year systemic meltdown of the economic system to edge you over the top in order to defeat a wrinkled old political whore peddling more of the same ugly crap – then no one should accuse you of running a brilliant campaign.

And that matters. Because a big mandate creates political space within which to implement a progressive agenda, while Obama will enter office with almost no mandate other than to be vaguely sensible and moderate in all things.

It matters because the best clue we have so far of how Obama would govern is how he has run.

There’s a word for both. But, unfortunately, these are not times which call for timidity.

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