Calling Dr. Doom
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It took Christopher Columbus about 70 days to get to the New World - a bit less than half as long as it took Americans to get through the 2008 primary calendar. Now that we have reached our destination, people in the Obama and McCain camps are feeling good about themselves.
Neither campaign is planning a major pivot for the fall. Both are confident they have a strategy for victory.
So my role today is Dr. Doom - to break through unmerited confidence and raise the anxiety level in both camps.
Since effectively wrapping up the nomination, Barack Obama lost seven of the last 13 primaries - not including the final contests on Tuesday in Montana and South Dakota. Obama's confidants say that this doesn't matter. In states like Pennsylvania and Ohio, primary-election results are no predictor of general-election results.
That's dubious. Though voters now prefer Democratic policy positions on most major issues by between 11 and 25 points, Obama has only a 0.7 percent lead over McCain in the RealClearPolitics average of polls. His favorability ratings among independents has dropped from 63 percent to 49 percent since late February.
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Furthermore, Obama has spent the past several months rolling up his sleeves and furiously courting working-class votes. It doesn't seem to be working.
Ron Brownstein of the National Journal calculates that Obama did no better among those voters in a late state like Pennsylvania than he did for 26 out of 29 earlier primary states where he lost the working class.
There is something about his magic that resonates powerfully with the well-educated but doesn't translate with the less-educated. As a result, you get all these odd poll results. Voters agree with Obama's original position on Iraq, but according to the Pew Research Center, they trust McCain more to handle the issue.
We haven't had two presidential candidates as far removed from the mainstream suburban lifestyle. McCain's family has been military for generations. But Obama's path through the university towns is particularly elusive.
Peter Hart did a focus group for the Annenberg Public Policy Center with independent voters in Virginia that captured reactions you hear all the time. These independent voters were intrigued by Obama's "change" message, but they knew almost nothing about him except that he used to go to the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church. It's as if they can't hang Obama's life onto anything from their own immediate experiences and, as a result, he is an abstraction. As Hart points out, people's inability to come up with a clear narrative about Obama could make it easy to label him in the fall.
Finally, the Obama people are too convinced that they can define McCain as Bush III. The case is just factually inaccurate. McCain will be able to pull out dozens of instances, from torture to global warming to spending, in which he broke with his party, as Rush Limbaugh will tell you.
The Republican camp, meanwhile, is possessed of the belief that Obama is a charming lightweight. Republican senators have contempt for Obama's post-partisan image, arguing that he and his staff refused to even participate in backroom bipartisan discussion groups.
But Obama is far from a lightweight, as Republicans will learn if he agrees to do joint town meetings with McCain. McCain's jabs that Obama is naïve will backfire. In this climate, a candidate can't define the other guy, only himself. When McCain attacks Obama for being naïve, all voters see is McCain being sour and negative.
More fundamentally, McCain's problem is that his party is unfit to govern. As research from the Republican pollster David Winston has shown, any policy becomes less popular when people learn that Republicans are supporting it. If the Republicans sponsored the sunrise, voters would prefer gloom.
Many Republicans are under the illusion that they are in trouble because they've betrayed their core principles. The sad truth is that if they'd been more conservative, they'd be even further behind.
I've spent the past few years trying to find conservative experts to provide remedies for middle-class economic anxiety. Let me tell you, the state of free-market thinking on this subject is pathetic. There are a few creative thinkers (most of them under 30), but for the most part, McCain is forced to run in an intellectual void.
On Tuesday, he is scheduled to give a forceful speech on why "reform" is better than "change." He plans to describe how to remobilize government and address economic anxiety. But McCain's reform message is only being carried by him and a few bloggers. Obama can draw on a coherent body of economic work and 10,000 unified voices.
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