With the glow of the conventions fading, Barack Obama has blunted John McCain’s momentum as built by his VP pick of Sarah Palin and convention speech excitement by successfully altering the media narrative and taking advantage of the rough economic news of recent days. Obama was on his heels at the end of the convention period, looking up at McCain for the first time since wrapping up the Democratic nomination in June – trailing by up to five points in the Gallup daily tracker last week. After the 9/11 Forum, the Obama campaign changed gears by first pushing a media narrative depicting McCain as out of touch and deriding his campaign as “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history.” While presidential historians generally scoffed at the Obama “sleaziest” claims, the Obama campaign has been successful in changing the subject from Obama’s gaffes (see lipstick on a pig) to the claimed untoward tactics of the McCain campaign.
On Sunday, news broke that giant investment banker Lehman Brothers was facing insolvency, and when neither the Treasury Department nor any private company wanted to pitch in, Lehman Brothers filed the biggest Chapter 11 Bankruptcy filing in U.S. history on Monday morning. Tuesday was American International Group’s (AIG) turn to look for suitors to save their flailing company, and late Tuesday night a 85 billion dollar federal loan was arranged. The federal loan did not shore up the market, and America has been shocked by the huge market losses in the first three days of the week, with the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropping over eight hundred points this week to close today at 10,609.66, off almost 8% for the week.
Obama has seized upon the economic anxiety spreading amongst voters to make his case for change by blaming the GOP policies and by extension McCain for the collapse of the corporate giants. As noted by the Obama campaign today, headlines across America shouting out horrible economic news are helping drive voters back to Obama. As expected, the cable news media is playing along with Obama by airing hourly segments about how bad economic news helps Obama and hurts McCain. McCain hasn’t helped himself by providing on Monday a sound bite for Obama’s use (“the fundamentals of the economy are strong”) in his “out of touch” narrative. Meanwhile the Obama campaign’s release this morning about the AIG loan didn’t exactly instill confidence in his economic expertise with the inability to proper identify AIG (Obama’s release discussed the American Insurance Group, not the actual company in question, American International Group).
The combination of the rough economic news and the strongly negative Obama messaging about McCain and his campaign have served to buoy the previously slumping Obama campaign. A mainstream media that appeared to strongly support the Obama campaign’s negative messaging has helped to amplify the effectiveness of Obama’s change in strategy on the public’s view of the candidates. Indeed, the back and forth between the campaigns has been to Obama’s decided advantage so far this week, and the advantage is beginning to show up clearly in the national and state polls. Obama jumped back ahead in the Gallup daily tracker today to a two-point lead, 47%-45%, his first time since the week of the GOP convention that Obama has had a lead.
As for Obama’s claim that McCain is running the “sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history,” and the mainstream media’s strong endorsement of Obama’s claims, reality runs counter to this narrative. The media and Obama point to two main examples of “dishonesty” from McCain: the kindergarden sex education ad, and the “lipstick on a pig” controversy. Both claims appear to this observer to be more differences in interpretation as opposed to dishonesty. Regarding the sex education ad, McCain’s ad states that Obama supported comprehensive sex education for K through 12th grade. Obama countered that the kindergarden sex curriculum was limited to “age appropriate” matters and hence McCain was lying, and the media readily agreed. In reality, the substantial change advocated by the proposed Illinois state legislation at issue does indeed call for comprehensive sex education for grades K-12 instead of only grades 6-12 as the previous law allowed for. The bill is unclear as to what exactly the kindergardeners would be taught, i.e. what is “age-appropriate”. Accordingly, McCain’s ad is not a lie and instead is a difference of interpretation between the campaigns in which the wording of the bill actually supports McCain’s ad.
As for the “lipstick on a pig” controversy, the Obama campaign managed to turn his arguably inartful comments back upon McCain by claiming that McCain campaign was lying when it pushed the message to the media that Obama was targeting Palin with the comment. To this observer whether Obama was referring to Palin or not is a matter of interpretation and accordingly the view of the McCain campaign can hardly be classified as dishonesty. If one watches the video clip, the crowd clearly appears to understand Obama’s comment as a ding on Palin and the initial press accounts of the comment from the Obama beat writers backed up this perception by the crowd. Obama managed to posit several different interpretations of his own comment, ranging from the pig being the Bush administration policies and the lipstick the new McCain “change” message to the pig being McCain and Palin being the lipstick. As Obama and his campaign could not definitively state what he meant by that comment, and the crowd who watched inferred Obama was dinging Palin, calling McCain a liar because of his campaign’s messaging here is disingenious at best.
Cutting through the fog of the present media narrative, it appears to this observer that neither candidate has developed a strong message that connects with voters on how to confront the present financial crisis and resolve it. Obama has touted his $1000 tax cut for the middle class while speaking in generalities about reducing the influence of special interests and lobbyists, while McCain has highlighted his intent to streamline and reform government agencies which regulate the economy to make such agencies more effective and less compartmentalized. Both candidates will surely continue to work to strike the right chord over the next few days with rattled voters who are looking for realistic solutions and not soundbites. The next few days are sure to continue on with the “McCain’s out of touch//sleazy” narrative unless McCain can find a way to break the news cycle’s present direction – something the campaign appears at present to be incapable of doing.