As McCain has experienced his post-convention bounce in the polls, I have been asking myself a few questions.
Why, if George Bush is so hideously unpopular, and if we so hate the Iraq war, does anything McCain say have traction with the American public? Why would McCain’s selecting a running mate who resembles no one more than George W. Bush–an inexperienced, “compassionate conservative,” vetted on foreign policy by hawkish neoconservatives–improve the Republican ticket’s chances of victory? Why is Barack Obama’s huge money advantage not translating into more votes?
I ask these questions out of genuine ignorance. I think I suffer from living in a fairly insular world where everyone more or less shares my political values. The reasons not to vote for McCain are so obvious and transparent to me and many people I know that I literally can’t conceive of how anyone would find his brand of “maverick” politics in any way convincing. It’s not clear how a Republican candidate can run as a “reform” candidate, when it is his own party that has been in complete control of the US government for five years, until 2006.
I tend reflexively to blame Democrats for their own failures. The Democrats spent two years, following their 2006 Congressional victories, studiously avoiding any significant challenge to George W. Bush, on the war, on torture, on illegal wiretapping. The Democrats did not arrest Karl Rove when–ignoring its subpoenas–he refused to testify before Congress. The Democrats did not even make minimal or symbolic gestures toward impeaching Bush, a move Republicans took against Clinton for far less significant offenses.
And now Barack Obama and his surrogates call McCain an honorable man whose military service we must respect with whom Democrats have a few policy disagreements. Not a bad guy, you see, just out of touch. John McCain and his surrogates imply, meanwhile, that Obama is an unpatriotic, elitist, arugala-eating, vaguely exotically foreign, arrogant, radical, dictator-appeasing, quasi-terrorist-lover. Sarah Palin, McCain’s surrogates say, had more experience on day one as mayor of Wasilla than Obama and Biden put together. And it works. The charges stick. Obama’s numbers drop. And Republicans surge ahead.
What is wrong with us?
By us, I mean those of us who prefer Obama to McCain. Why do we take this abuse–why do we let ourselves get punched in the face–again and again, then hit back by saying that our opponents are out of touch, they don’t get it, etc.? Why does MSNBC cave in under the mildest of pressure from the American right-wing establishment, pulling Keith Olbermann and Chris Matthews from regular coverage of the election, while someone like Britt Hume gets to keep hosting his right-wing news program on Fox News? Where is the call for John McCain to be interviewed by Olbermann or Rachel Maddow in exactly the same way that Obama was interviewed, after months and months of the most scurrilously biased coverage, by Fox News’ Bill O’Reilly? Why isn’t the Democratic party slamming Fox News every single day, at every opportunity, using some of its money to start “Fox News Watch” or a similar website? Olbermann is MSNBC’s top-rated host, but the network’s brand is supposedly, in some mysterious way, “damaged” by its biggest cash cow. The same cowardice in the face of the right-wing was evident during the run-up to the Iraq war; Phil Donahue, one of the only antiwar voices on American television, not to mention MSNBC’s highest rated host, was sacked by MSNBC as the war began. Apparently, speaking out against the war was politically incorrect.
Do we believe in our own politics? Do we genuinely believe that this is a life or death election? Do we not think, whatever Obama’s flaws, that his election will represent a non-trivial improvement over the last eight years, let alone over a McCain-Palin administration? I’m just asking, because from everything I see, we act as if we don’t believe any of these things.