David

Karki

Read David's bio and previous columns here

October 6, 2008

McCain Needs to Fight Harder Than This

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin more than held her own against Sen. Joe Biden Thursday night, putting to rest any further doubts about her ability to hang with the big boys. She was likeable and energetic, connected with viewers and provided a good contrast with the older, slightly tired-looking lifelong senator. Insofar as intangibles go, she won going away.

And yet, when it came to substance, I don't think much changed. Biden, for his part, held his own in that regard. He got out all the usual Democratic talking points to satiate the base, and hit Sen. John McCain with some solid liberal criticisms. Palin didn't respond to most of them, nor to several contradictory statements Biden made within the debate itself. She left a good many opportunities to zing Biden and Obama on the table, unused.

Just one example: Biden insisted that Barack Obama never said that he would sit down unconditionally with Iranian dictator Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The fact is, Obama did say that (check it out on You Tube) and proudly declared it on his website, which said “Obama is the only candidate that supports tough, direct presidential diplomacy with Iran without preconditions.”

Blatant falsehoods like that have to be called out, especially when the biggest TV audience of the entire campaign is watching. It's the only chance they'll ever have to go over the top of the pro-Obama media and break through the shield of protection they've placed over him. To see Palin not take advantage of this and many other good openings that Biden served up was disappointing, to say the least.

To be sure, some of this is due to the fact that she's speaking for McCain, and it's the vice president's role to support the top of the ticket.  And since he's not been a solid conservative for quite some time, it would be contradictory for her to be so now. That much is understandable.

Still, it would have be nice to see her link the Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac scandals to the Democrats who caused it – Rep. Barney Frank and Sen. Chris Dodd, among others – and then point out that Obama was the second-biggest recipient of donations from those just-bailed-out institutions, or say anything else that might have inflicted some lasting, memorable damage to which the Obama campaign would have been forced to respond.

But that didn't happen. Palin will provide a needed shot in the arm, a boost of adrenaline to a campaign that had begun to flag a little bit. But this will be forgotten in a few days' time. In the end, it's going to be up to McCain himself to keep this thing going, and not let it drift into an incoherent mishmash of left, right and center. (And can we please stop using the word “maverick”? It's lost all power it may have ever had thanks to being beaten into the ground so relentlessly.) Voters ultimately choose based on the top of the ticket, not the bottom.

There needs to be a narrative of some kind that people can latch onto, and it needs to be driven home. The Democrats have one, untrue to the point of delusion, completely Marxist and riddled with obsessive backward-looking Bush-hate though it is. And they have the biased mainstream media to shout it for them all day, every day. This would not be easy to beat, even for a solid conservative who is an especially good speaker.

For McCain, who is neither, it will be extremely tough. And while I hope I am wrong in this assessment, he's been looking entirely too much like Bob Dole '96 for comfort as of late. Perhaps the town-hall format of the next debate, which McCain would have them all be if he could, will prove a jump-starter.

Whatever the angle he takes, and whatever the style, the main thing is that McCain has to go on maximum offense, by whatever definition the McCain campaign may have for it. This bipartisan, getting along, “reaching out to his friends across the aisle” stuff is going to get him defeated because his opponent's vast weaknesses will go unexploited as a result. Meanwhile, his own weaknesses will be getting hammered daily and relentlessly. This sort of thing adds up in a hurry.

Not to mention that it deflates the base's enthusiasm in a way that even Palin can't entirely make up for. And this is a base that has never been particularly comfortable about having McCain as its ostensible standard-bearer. Yet he seems bound and determined to run as far to the left as possible, to the point of voting for this monstrosity of a bailout bill – and throwing away his clearest advantage in the process, by staying silent on the dozens of pork-barrel earmarks attached to it. The credibility he had on that issue has taken a major self-inflicted hit as a result.

Governor Palin has demonstrated what it will take to fire up the electorate to vote Republican this fall. I only hope McCain can shake off his inside-the-Beltway conventional wisdom for the next month to see that he must go with the former and not the latter if he is to win the presidency.

© 2008 North Star Writers Group. May not be republished without permission.

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