The Uncommon Touch

As Dick Polman writes in the Philadelphia Inquirer, it's hard to imagine that the Democrats could find a way to lose this year's presidential election to John McCain.

"Yet, McCain is deadlocked in the polls with his two Democratic rivals," Polman writes. "He is traipsing around the nation on his 'Time for Action Tour,' blissfully unscathed and husbanding his septuagenarian strengths, while the Obama and Clinton armies burrow ever deeper into their respective trenches, emerging every so often to impale themselves on barbed wire, generally mimicking the bloody stalemate on the western front in World War I."

With the media spotlight focused squarely on the Democrats' battle for the nomination, it's no wonder that it looks like the eventual survivor will be too bloodied to successfully turn back an electoral challenge from the rested and ready McCain.

But is McCain going to be ready? Does he have the answers to America's problems?

Some have suggested that supporters of Obama and Clinton may defect to McCain or choose not to participate in the general election at all, but Ann McFeatters of the Boston Herald believes that "mainstream" members of both parties will support their nominees.

Democrats will support their ticket, and so will Republicans, McFeatters says. "The issues are simply too critical" to support someone else or stay at home.

Although the discussion has focused on the Obama or Clinton supporters who swear they will not support their rival in the general election, McCain is having his own problems in his party.

Frank Rich observes, in the New York Times, that even though the issue has been settled in the Republican Party, more than 800,000 of Pennsylvania's Republicans voted in their presidential primary last Tuesday. McCain won again, but "more voters than the margin ... that separated Hillary Clinton and Mr. Obama" voted for Ron Paul against McCain.

"Those antiwar Paul voters are all potential defectors to the Democrats in November," Rich writes. As are, he points out, the Republicans who voted for Mike Huckabee.

Typically, both parties lose a few voters to the other side, but perhaps, by and large, McFeatters is right. Most self-described Democrats and Republicans will vote for their party's nominee.

That means, of course, that the issue will be decided -- as it usually is -- by the "independent" group of voters in the middle. Sometimes, when those voters feel they have a viable third option (as they apparently felt they had with Ross Perot in the 1992 race), they take it, but they have no such option in 2008.

Peggy Noonan, former speechwriter for President Reagan, writes in the Wall Street Journal that George W. Bush has lost his political base, and that will harm McCain.

"In Lubbock, Texas -- Lubbock Comma Texas, the heart of Texas conservatism -- they dislike President Bush," Noonan writes. "He has lost them. I was there and saw it. Confusion has been followed by frustration has turned into resentment, and this is huge. Everyone knows the president's poll numbers are at historic lows, but if he is over in Lubbock, there is no place in this country that likes him. ... He has left on-the-ground conservatives ... feeling undefended, unrepresented and alone. This will have impact down the road."

In the New York Times, Ron Klain speaks of Bush this way: he is the "shadow" hanging over McCain.

"The question of how a presidential nominee deals with a sitting president of his own party is one of the trickiest dilemmas in a campaign -- a challenge that is underappreciated by most observers," writes Klain. "It is no accident that in the elections since World War II when a candidate has tried to succeed the sitting president of his own party (1952, 1960, 1968, 1988 and 2000), that candidate has failed to capture the White House four out of five times."

Foreign policy is important, of course, and with McCain unable to distiniguish between Sunnis and Shiites, it will continue to be important -- because, if nothing else, McCain represents a continuation of the Bush foreign policy. If McCain cannot tell the difference between the two main branches of Islam (and their acrimonious relationship with each other), his (allegedly offhand) comment about a 100-year occupation of Iraq being necessary may have more than an element of truth behind it.

Frankly, writes J. Peter Scoblic in the Los Angeles Times, "McCain's foreign policy is far more consistent than it seems. Much like George W. Bush, McCain sees the world in oppositional terms -- us versus them, and good versus evil. ... To [McCain], it is a 'transcendent struggle between good and evil.' This alone tells us much of what we need to know."

But what's hitting Americans in the face right now is the state of the economy. If you're having trouble putting gas in your tank or food on the table or even keeping a roof over your head, that trumps just about anything that's happening half a world away.

Some writers have linked Bush's anemic approval ratings to the performance of the economy (although, truthfully, his approval ratings were struggling before the recession, and they appear to have suffered from the cumulative effects of the Iraq War, the Terri Schiavo case, Hurricane Katrina, Harriet Miers' nomination to the Supreme Court, etc., as well as the current economic woes).

In the National Journal, Ronald Brownstein writes that "Bush’s epic descent" in his approval ratings puts McCain in an awkward position as the presumptive nominee of the outgoing president's party.

McCain must walk a delicate tightrope, defending Bush's policies on the one hand, promising to make things even better on the other hand. It's a tough sell.

The headline on the National Journal piece calls the phenomenon "McCain's Economic Undertow." With gas prices likely to exceed $4/gallon at some point this year, food prices shooting through the roof, an out-of-control mortgage crisis and other economic problems certain to emerge, Americans have to wonder if they can trust the economy to a presidential candidate who has admitted that he doesn't know much about economics.

Brownstein puts the economic factor into perspective.

"The economy has grown under Bush (2.5% annually after inflation), but the rate of growth has trailed the pace under every president since Dwight Eisenhower, except George H.W. Bush," he writes. "Likewise, federal data show that job growth has averaged less than 1% annually under this Bush -- lower than it was under any president since World War II. The median income ... has declined slightly since Bush took office, after rising 16% under Bill Clinton. The number of Americans in poverty has increased by 3.5 million under Bush after declining by nearly 8 million under Clinton."

McCain has been trying lately to show that he has a Clintonesque abillity to "feel your pain" in his visits to poverty-stricken areas of America (where "hope" and "change" could be regarded as antiquated concepts), but that weeklong tour of the "forgotten places" often misfired, according to Matt Stearns of McClatchy Newspapers.

"McCain, the longtime scourge of congressional 'earmark' spending who's promised to veto every bill with earmarks if he's elected president, was aboard a ferry (in Alabama) that's financed by a $2 million earmark in a 2005 spending bill," observes Stearns.

"There were other jarring moments," Stearns writes. "In Youngstown (Ohio), McCain sounded like a populist, decrying an education system in which those who live in affluent areas have access to better schools than those who live in poor areas. Yet he defended the system of paying for schools through local taxes, which helps create that dichotomy because rich localities can afford better schools than poor ones can."

I think that anyone who says the Democratic nominee can or cannot win the general election at this point has jumped to a flawed conclusion.

It's only April 27. We have more than six months to go until Election Day, and a lot can happen in that time. But both major party candidates will have flaws to deal with and fences to mend within their parties.

Each nominee can be expected to exploit weaknesses that have been exposed. I expect a photo finish in November.

In the end, I think the vote will be split down the middle. Maybe the circumstances would imply an easy win for the Democrats, but I think the electorate is just as polarized as it was eight years ago. The Democrats might win just because they have been out of power for the last eight years and the sliver of a swing vote that exists in this country decides to give them a chance.

But I haven't seen any evidence in the latest polls that persuades me that either Obama or Clinton has more of an edge in a confrontation with McCain than the other does at this stage of the campaign.