Posted by WLS:
While the race seems to have stabilized in the 4-6 point range — with about 8-10% undecided — Obama is within 2-3 points of locking down the election. Frankly, I think that continues to reflect a problem that is significant for Obama — with all the wind at his back, he’s still having trouble cracking through 50%. The longer he is stuck in the high 40’s, the more of a possibility it is that late-deciding voters are going to go with the “safer” pick of the candidate they know best.
I rarely agree with Lawrence O’Donnell anymore but he made an insightful and accurate comment last night when he said the 8-10% of the electorate that remains undecided are low-information/low-interest voters. They don’t watch the news and they don’t follow the campaigns.
They’re not undecided this late in the game because they are genuinely torn between the two candidates. They are undecided because they aren’t interested in politics and they aren’t really paying much attention even now. The debates might be the first part of the campaign that gets their attention. They are the kind of voters that have to be called and reminded to go to the polls, and they respond with comments like “The election is today? Well, I need to go vote.”
So, how can McCain break through to these voters with a message that isn’t necessarily resonating even with those voters paying attention? I think the events of the last two weeks dictate a complete change in message for him — one that he’s much more comfortable delivering. He should simply take on the entire political class/establishment in Washington and the K Street Lobby that works both sides of the aisle depending on which party is in power. He needs to call out the current state of politics in Washington as a matter of corruption — without regard to who he offends.
I read somewhere in the last couple days — but didn’t have time to post on it — an entry from a recent poll (maybe the WSJ poll) that said by a margin of something like 50-30%, voters believe it is more important to clean out the corruption in Washington than it is to reverse Bush Administration policies with which they disagree.
In my mind this really punctures the myth that it is Bush Derangement Syndrome that is behind the “Right Track/Wrong Track” number that has revealed itself in poll after poll, and is the real reason behind way the GOP got waxed in 2006 and is poised to be whacked again in 2008 in Congress.
The collapse of the financial system under what was clearly a rigged process of government intervention in lending, coupled with the impression that the bailout bill was simply a way to take Wall Street “Fat Cats” off the hook for their bad decisions, encapsulates this feeling in the electorate. Congress ruins the financial services industry – which they gladly go along with when they are earning big fees on the bad loans they are making — and when it all collapses Congress comes to the taxpayer with the bill to pay for the cleanup.
McCain can’t be skittish about the language he uses. He’s got to abandon the fake collegiality of Senate-speak and call out elected politicians in both parties for their corruption — criminal and otherwise.
He needs to hammer home the point that he has objected for his entire time in both the House and Senate to the system of trading votes on special interest projects for campaign contributions from those special interests.
He needs to point out that every elected official in Washington understands that the best way to avoid a serious challenge to your elected office is to have a fat campaign account, and the quickest way to fatten up that campaign account is to vote favors for groups that can quickly start a flow of money your way.
McCain needs to convert this election to a choice between him and Obama. He must make the case that Obama is a product of and loyal to one of the most corrupt political machines in the United States. McCain needs to run against the system — one that has benefited his own party in the past –while identifying Obama as the quintessential product of the system.
It can’t be a message based on “us v. them” populism — that’s a Democrat message. It has to be a message based on attacking a broken and corrupt system in which McCain’s own party is as much to blame as Obama’s party.
He needs to name names, and when all is said and done understand that he can’t go back to the Senate if he loses. It would be his last act of a gallant warrior on behalf of his country.
Its not desperation, just a calculation that he’s not going to beat “hopey and changey” on the issue of how much a box of cereal costs and why the deductibles on health care plans continue to rise.
But the core of voters’ anger is not that things are more expensive than they were eight years ago. The core of voters’ anger is that Congress is part of the reason why that is so, but Congress is not interested in making life better for the citizen taxpayers.