Presidential election 2008 - about the past, present and future

Frank Rich understands the current political zeitgeist. The past and the present are really bad news. McCain lives there. Obama offers a view of a different and sharply improved future, one that McCain cannot achieve with his conservative views. From Frank Rich at the New York Times:

to dismiss Barack Obama’s magical mystery tour through old Europe and two war zones as a media-made fairy tale would be to underestimate the ingenious politics of the moment. History was on the march well before Mr. Obama boarded his plane, and his trip was perfectly timed to reap the whirlwind.

He never would have been treated as a president-in-waiting by heads of state or network talking heads if all he offered were charisma, slick rhetoric and stunning visuals. What drew them instead was the raw power Mr. Obama has amassed: the power to start shaping events and the power to move markets, including TV ratings. (Even “Access Hollywood” mustered a 20 percent audience jump by hosting the Obama family.) Power begets more power, absolutely.

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”

Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq’s $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That’s the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The “change” that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality — sometimes through Mr. Obama’s instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not.

The article by Frank Rich lays out the collapse of the Bush strategy for dealing with the Middle east, together with the very untimely collapse of the McCain strategy that depended on being the continuation of that Bush strategy.

Frank Rich states

Looking back now, we can see that the fortnight preceding the candidate’s flight to Kuwait was like a sequence in an old movie where wind blows away calendar pages to announce an epochal plot turn. First, on July 7, the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri al-Maliki, dissed Bush dogma by raising the prospect of a withdrawal timetable for our troops. Then, on July 15, Mr. McCain suddenly noticed that more Americans are dying in Afghanistan than Iraq and called for more American forces to be sent there. It was a long-overdue recognition of the obvious that he could no longer avoid: both Robert Gates, the defense secretary, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, had already called for more American troops to battle the resurgent Taliban, echoing the policy proposed by Mr. Obama a year ago.

On July 17 we learned that President Bush, who had labeled direct talks with Iran “appeasement,” would send the No. 3 official in the State Department to multilateral nuclear talks with Iran. Lest anyone doubt that the White House had moved away from the rigid stand endorsed by Mr. McCain and toward Mr. Obama’s, a former Rumsfeld apparatchik weighed in on The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page: “Now Bush Is Appeasing Iran.”

Within 24 hours, the White House did another U-turn, endorsing an Iraq withdrawal timetable as long as it was labeled a “general time horizon.” In a flash, as Mr. Obama touched down in Kuwait, Mr. Maliki approvingly cited the Democratic candidate by name while laying out a troop-withdrawal calendar of his own that, like Mr. Obama’s, would wind down in 2010. On Tuesday, the British prime minister, Gordon Brown, announced a major drawdown of his nation’s troops by early 2009.

But it’s not merely the foreign policy consensus that is shifting Obama-ward. The Texas oilman T. Boone Pickens has now joined another high-profile McCain supporter, Arnold Schwarzenegger, in knocking the McCain nostrum that America can drill its way out of its energy crisis. Mr. Pickens, who financed the Swift-boat campaign smearing John Kerry in 2004, was thought to be a sugar daddy for similar assaults against the Democrats this year. Instead, he is underwriting nonpartisan ads promoting wind power and speaks of how he would welcome Al Gore as energy czar if there’s an Obama administration.

The Obama stampede is forcing Mr. McCain to surrender on other domestic fronts. After the Democrat ran ads in 14 states berating chief executives who are “making more in 10 minutes” than many workers do in a year, a newly populist Mr. McCain began railing against “corporate greed” — much as he also followed Mr. Obama’s example and belatedly endorsed a homeowners’ bailout he had at first opposed. Given that Mr. McCain has already used a refitted, hand-me-down Obama campaign slogan (“A Leader You Can Believe In”), it can’t be long before he takes up fist bumps. They’ve become the rage among young (nonterrorist) American businessmen, according to USA Today.

Elections clearly matter.

Bush has refused to react to complaints about his failed policies - until John McCain, running for the third Bush tern - has found that the Bush positions are not sufficient popular to get McCain elected. The result is that Bush is modifying his policies as fast as possible and McCain is running away from the Bush/Cheney positions.

Unfortunately for the Republicans, Barrack Obams is running on a platform of changing the Bush policies while McCain runs as a continuation of those clearly failed policies.

Although McCain is running as a Not-Bush, he cannot separate himself from the Bush/Cheney policies and keep the conservative Republican base of voters who previously committed themselves to Bush and the Republicans. Anyone who opposed the failed Bush/Cheney positions will have to vote for Obama, throw away their vote on a third party (Green or Libertarian) or sit out the November 4 election.

Frank Rich's last paragragraph is especially important:

The election remains Mr. Obama’s to lose, and he could lose it, whether through unexpected events, his own vanity or a vice-presidential misfire. But what we’ve learned this month is that America, our allies and most likely the next Congress are moving toward Mr. Obama’s post-Iraq vision of the future, whether he reaches the White House or not. That’s some small comfort as we contemplate the strange alternative offered by the Republicans: a candidate so oblivious to our nation’s big challenges ahead that he is doubling down in his campaign against both Mr. Maliki and Mr. Obama to be elected commander in chief of the surge.

The real question for the Presidential election is whether the American electorate in the swing states have come to grips with the problems of reality, either today or in the future.

Barack is looking at the future - the Conservatives who support McCain are not. They simply don't want things to change from how they work now. In times of great change, conservatives are a severe social liability.

That's what this election is all about. America cannot afford a third conservative Bush term as represented by McCain. That disaster is worse than any mistakes Obama might make after being elected.

Clinton campaign: trapped in unreality, spouting blind spin

The Clinton campaign seems stuck, with wheels spinning but traction lost. Obama seems to be moving rapidly towards the nomination with the wins over the last weekend. The political momentum is away from Clinton and towards Obama, and the Clinton campaign seems to have no idea what action they can take to change the situation.

The Clinton campaign has responded with strange, unrealistic threats that they will take the nomination based on the decisions of the superdelegates even if Obama gets more regular delegates. This has been a major misstep, one that Josh Marshall blames on Clinton adviser Mark Penn.

How a misstep? Take a look at yesterday's post by Digby. The suggestion from the Clinton campaign that if the regular delegates break towards Obama that the Clinton campaign will take the nomination on the strength of the superdelegates has infuriated a lot of Democrats. That's not a reaction that a campaign that finds itself sliding out of the lead wants from the party members they expect to represent.

Not only has revealing that proposed tactic made the Clinton campaign’s problems worse rather than better, it's also obviously unrealistic. It looks as though the Clinton campaign, having run the campaign for the nomination from the start on the theory that they would simply overwhelm the opposition and roll to victory, has bought into its own fantasy and can’t respond when reality intrudes. Clinton is clearly no longer the inevitable Democratic nominee for President. Are they so trapped inside the beltway bubble that they can’t see that the dynamics have changed? What makes them think that if Obama gets more regular delegates, the Clinton campaign has a lock on the superdelegates?

Nothing forces the superdelegates to vote for Clinton, not even their previous commitments. Superdelegate, Congressional Representative and long-time Civil Rights leader John L. Lewis, who earlier endorsed Clinton, has just announced that he is switching his support to Obama.

As Josh Marshall says, endorsements don’t ordinarily sway votes. But Lewis’ is not just an endorsement. It is also proof that the supposed inevitability of the Clinton nomination is a mirage. Even the old-line Democrats who make up the superdelegates are wavering and Lewis’ announcement gives a lot of other Superdelegates as well as primary voters in Texas and Ohio new freedom to take a second look at the decision between Clinton and Obama. Since the Clinton campaign has been based on the Mark Penn strategy that Clinton is the inevitable nominee, the events of the last few weeks leave Clinton without a viable campaign strategy as well as a clear appearance that they don't know how to react to the Obama surge.

Spin isn't going to get the Clinton campaign any traction. Nor is going negative on Obama, since that feeds into his real strength as a candidate that he is above the nastiness. So Clinton's strategy to run the campaign based on appearing to be the inevitable candidate is gone. Worse, the Clinton people clearly don't know how to respond to the changed circumstance. In fact, their attempts to deal with the new situation gives the appearance that they don't even realize that their circumstances have changed.

It's really looking like the Democrats will nominate Obama for President in Denver this summer, and Clinton is simply gobsmacked. She and her people can't believe it and don't know what to do about it.

Of all the surprises that have occurred during this strange Presidential campaign season, I think this one surprises me most.

So far.