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BY JONATHAN EMONT

In print | October 9, 2008

I am generally interested in this type of thing, but Tuesday’s presidential debate was boring. I don’t think there was a single meaningful exchange. McCain referred to Obama as “that one” which was possibly offensive. There you have it.

Obama won the debate, although it was more by default than deftness. He was far more articulate than McCain, didn’t sound either professorial or folksy, and had a plan to solve the financial crises that didn’t involve lowering taxes on the wealthy. Obama didn’t pull any punches or lose his cool or do anything that might jeopardize his lead in the polls. McCain didn’t land any punches or find his cool or do anything that might jeopardize Obama’s lead in the polls. A CNN poll of debate watchers found that 68% of them thought Obama more likeable. Only 28% preferred McCain.

So, as of this writing, things look pretty clear. Every major polling site believes the odds heavily favor Obama, and if the election were held tomorrow, it’s perfectly possible that Obama would win a contiguous line of states stretching from Minnesota to Maine, and another stretching from Maine down to North Carolina. According to Pollster.com (probably the best site for this type of thing) it’s not improbable that Obama will receive over 350 electoral votes.

How did this happen? It was only three weeks ago when Democrats (myself included) were panicked, that rumors abounded in the blogosphere that Hillary Clinton would replace Joe Biden as vice-presidential nominee, and that Obama was being eviscerated by his supporters for being too calm and confident and boring.

Two things happened, in my un-profound estimation. The first involved Sarah Palin and the second involved the financial meltdown.

Sarah Palin, I still maintain, was an extremely smart vice-presidential pick. We have only to remember the atmosphere after the Democratic Convention, when it seemed that an Obama victory was inevitable, to remember how significantly Palin changed the equation of the race. She gave conservatives another good reason to vote and lent the Republican ticket some dash and sparkle.

The backlash, however, was inevitable. While every American understood that Palin’s knowledge of foreign affairs was limited, no one suspected that she wouldn’t be able to name a single news publication that she read. (Surely this is a pretty easy answer to bullshit, no?) And her absolutely asinine suggestion, that her state’s proximity to Russia meant that she was somehow better equipped to deal with the Russian menace, added a little levity to an otherwise unrelenting race.

Palin is still the darling of the heartland, not that I claim to speak for it. But her provincialism, her conservatism, and her utter lack of knowledge about most things political, made the ticket far less appealing to the educated and wealthier portions of McCain’s base. Whatever early polls showed about Palin switching white women’ allegiances, I don’t think that after sitting through the Katie Couric interview many Hillary supporters continued believing that Palin was the woman for them.
In the end though, it was the financial crises that did her in.

One of Palin’s first, and most revealing utterances was that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae had “gotten too big and expensive for taxpayers.” She failed to take into account that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae were, at the time, largely (alrthough not completely) privately owned.

McCain’s attempts at showing the public how serious he is about fixing the economy are somewhat undermined, therefore, by his choice of vice-presidential nominee.

Palin was McCain’s only dramatic option, and he chose her at a time when he needed to change the campaign’s trajectory. It worked for a while, but the McCain campaign had no follow up act. Then the financial meltdown happened, and Palin’s inadequacies were illuminated for all to see.

The debates have also helped Obama. McCain has been alienating every base he has ever courted, railing against corporate “excess and greed” a number of times in both debates while promising these same, presumably greedy and excessive people, even higher tax cuts. With corporations donating in record amount to the Democratic candidate, it’s unclear who McCain is hoping to win over with his tax plan. It’s almost admirable: McCain just seems ideologically in favor of inequality, whatever the political costs.

Obama, by contrast, appears calm and commanding. His demeanor hasn’t changed since he won the nomination, and, at this point, there is no reason to suspect it will.

In this race, it doesn’t seem like either of the candidates’ actions are variables anymore. Their positions on issues are clearly defined so external factors will determine the race.

When the economy has sunk, the job market has dried up, and the failure of government oversight has contributed to the mess, it isn’t a good time to be a member of the ruling party. Obama hasn’t said anything particularly brilliant on the campaign trail, but neither does he have to. It’s simply a good time to be a Democrat.

So when you get a debate as you did last night, with Obama declaring America a fundamental “force for good,” and a soul-searching McCain telling us that he believed that “America is the greatest country in the world,” Obama supporters can take heart that between now and election day, something really, really cool is going to have to happen for McCain to win it.

Jonathan is a first-year. He can be reached at jemont1@swarthmore.edu.

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