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Financial crisis flattens McCain Saturday, Oct 4, 2008 By Doug Thompson John McCain's presidential prospects collapsed this week, flattened by the Panic of '08 like a Wall Street investment bank. Pollster.com overlays state-by-state poll results with a map of the Electoral College. Republican nominee McCain was within 20 electoral votes of Democrat Barack Obama as recently as the week before last. That gap was 87 electoral votes Friday morning. Senator Obama of Illinois now clearly leads in states with 250 of the 270 electoral votes needed to win. If anybody has a theory of what could slash and burn McCain like that besides the lending crisis, I'd love to hear it. Brian Schaffner of Pollster.com goes into detail in the article, "Can McCain Make an October Comeback?" The bottom line: The independents have made up their minds. A comeback at this late date is highly unlikely. The campaign trail is littered with columns by wiseguys predicting McCain's demise. I considered that record long and hard before writing on this. McCain's out of time and tricks. This latest dive wasn't caused by political fashion or trends. The lending crisis is reality: as real as it gets, to use the appropriate cliche. That reality has clearly landed on one candidate rather than the other. I've already received e-mail telling me how this crisis is "all the Democrats' fault." Heck, polls show that 2 percent of voters manage to blame Bill Clinton for this. None of that matters. This is an election and the perceptions are in. As usual in a crisis, the side that isn't in the White House is winning. My only question was whether the lending crisis or the highly unpopular bailout plan caused McCain's collapse. That question's answered. McCain received no benefit from brief Republican defiance of the bailout. He was given more credit, or blame, for that than he deserved, by the way. Anybody who's ever met a Republican member of the House should have known that they, as a group, were never on board this plan before the first vote. McCain was irrelevant - which is even worse when you think about it. McCain also had a very bad week. To be blunt, his flapping and clucking looked scatter-brained. Columnist Steven Stark of Boston put it very well: "Impulsive to a fault, in the past several weeks McCain has certainly been anything but steady at the helm. The economy is good - oops, no it isn't. I'm for the Paulson plan - no, maybe I'm not. I won't be going to the debates unless there's a bailout deal - oh, I guess I'll go. "All along, McCain's trump card had been that Obama was too inexperienced to offer voters the stability the nation requires. That argument looks a lot shakier today." There's another factor at work here. Millions of people who need to replace their car can't get a loan now. Millions of people need home equity loans to manage credit card debt and can't get them. Millions of people need to sell their houses and can't. Many of those millions of people on what's now the front line of the lending crisis are working class whites. Those "Reagan Democrats" are the very group Obama's had the hardest time winning over. They are - or were - Sarah Palin's biggest fans. They also know who bears the brunt whenever times get bad. I'm told Governor Palin of Alaska, McCain's pick for vice president, had a good night in Thursday's debate. That's nice, but no longer relevant. ========== Doug Thompson is a Fayetteville-based reporter and columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau and the Morning News. His e-mail address is dthompson@arkansasnews.com. |
