Mc-Cained: Poll to poll with Sarah Palin

A week is a long time in politics, as is too frequently said, though it does feel like an eternity since Obama made his keynote speech in Denver after hurricane Palin blew on to the political scene. 

 

The Republican two, but McCain should have looked leftwards for his running mate

Within a day the media was mopping up the news that Sarah Palin, the Alaskan governor who replaced her Republican predecessor who embroiled himself in a political corruption scandal in 2006, would be McCain’s running mate.  What happened to Romney?  What happened to Lieberman?  The keys to the white house would now be a breath away from a forty-four year-old hockey mum.  McCain lost the experience card on his ticket and has gambled on someone who can steal some of the youthful limelight and mantra of change that Obama holds.

 

This was a mistake.  Whilst Gustav did not rain on the Republicans parade and the party’s rank and file maybe re-galvanised for a pavement-pounding, cyberspace-surfing campaign; McCain has blown his chance card of change.

 

In her inaugural speech ten days ago Palin spoke of eighteen million voters putting cracks in the glass ceiling by voting for Hillary and tried to pick up the fallen baton of the female voter.  Yet women were hardly turned off by Obama – politically as much as anything else – and with the under-35s he had greater support.  The reinforced, double-glazed glass-ceiling that the Republicans actually have to smash is keeping the White House against the odds for a third term.  And even though her convention speech was arousing for the social conservatives and she touched many popular bases with the small town, blue-collared Americans; her views of anti-green, anti-abortion, pro-gun and a hardline on terror sound exactly the same as the policies the US has had for the past eight years.  Joe Biden can tap into blue collar America just as well.

 

As important as the VP maybe, even if Ms Palin herself was unaware of this just a month ago, it is still the Commander-in-Chief who most people will look to when they cast their vote on November 8.  McCain had rising popularity in the early days of the Primaries with his straight talking, centrist views which went against the grain of current Republican thinking.  He was critical of Guantanamo, recalling his own tortured past in Vietnam he called on the prison to be shut down.  On the economy, McCain was more liberal than Clinton and Obama who had supported more protectionist measures against free trade and NAFTA which has generated prosperity and growth for America, Mexico and Canada and has incredible potential.  His opponents attacked it (even though Bill Clinton signed the treaty) as though it was the gutter draining American jobs (this in fact is China which has also been draining Mexican jobs and finishing the Doha round of trade talks which have dragged for five years would go along way to improving the World’s economic climate).  On abortion he has been indifferent, once saying hypothetically that if his daughter wanted one it would be her decision (Palin said the same thing last week about her pregnant seventeen year-old by for other seventeen year-olds she would deny them the right to choose).  With foreign policy he has been much firmer and shown political courage supporting the surge in Iraq and immediately jumping to Georgia’s defence last month whilst Bush and Obama seemed at odds at what to say on the matter.

 

This is not to say that if I were able to vote across the pond I would mark a cross next to McCain.  The old McCain has gone and he has veered to the Republican right and pandered to the religious conservatives whom he once described as “agents of intolerance”.  This will be his undoing.  His party is unpopular.  Double digits separate them from the Democrats who are set for a landslide.  Yet before last weekend McCain led Obama in the polls and last week he had the chance to grab the party by their stensons and get them to take on his potentially winning mantle with the message “We need to change to win” and to have the audacity of hope by moving to the centre which is were he got his lead.  With former Democratic and now independent senator Joe Lieberman as his running mate he could have really made the point that he wants to work with democrats and independents and scoop up those wavering Democrats not sure what Obama stands for.  Lieberman would have strengthened McCain’s experienced hand with his economics knowledge as foreign policy and would not be seen as unfit for office even at the age of sixty-six.

 

But McCain did not do this.  His convention speech on Thursday night was bland even by his mediocre standards of public speaking compared to the Democrat’s two.  Instead he shamelessly tried to pin Obama as a tax increasing liberal and he the tax cutter ignoring completely the content of his opponent’s speech and going for the traditional Republican dig.  If Obama’s speech was thin on the specifics of his policy outlines at least he had outlines.  McCain offered little other than giving his biography and saying he would cut tax for corporations and the essentially the rich.  He has shunned the ideas and potential policies that would have turned on centrists and libertarians in the US and has started supporting the same old policies of Bush which he – like Obama – had once criticised.  McCain should have had resilience in the “real McCain” and stood for what he has believed in for more than a decade.  Now we wait to see what the polls show but this shift to the same old Republican core could be the beginning of his campaign folding.