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The Lone Ranger

Obamaphiles Worry About a McCain Comeback

With Obama's campaign starting to make mistakes, the election could still go either way, warns SPIEGEL ONLINE blogger Peter Ross Range. After all, 10 days is a lifetime in American politics.

Friends: This thing ain’t over. I don’t care how much the polls, the trends, the young people, the new voters and the conservative apostates are tilting in Barack Obama’s favor. It could still go either way. As Karl Rove reminds us, at this point in George W. Bush’s 1994 Texas governor’s race, he was pronounced dead. In one week he came from behind and won by 7 points -- a victory whose ramifications we still feel today.

And, as McCain’s campaign manager Steve Schmidt notes in today’s New York Times, Al Gore was this far behind in 2000 -- and then came within 500 Florida votes of winning (out of 101 million votes cast).

And don’t forget Harry Truman. He was, according to the best polling of 1948, sure to lose to New York Gov. Thomas Dewey going into Election Day. So sure, in fact, that one of America’s top newspapers, the Chicago Tribune, went to press on Election Night with a huge headline reading: “Dewey Defeats Truman!”

The next day Truman, the victor, posed for one of the most famous photos in American history, holding up the Chicago newspaper as he celebrated his new presidency.

There are at least two strong reasons for Obamaphiles like me to be worried about a McCain comeback -- and they’re both the fault of the otherwise perfectly-run Obama campaign.

The first is Obama’s slip-up in telling Joe the Plumber (Samuel J. Wurzelbacher of Holland, Ohio) that he would like to “spread the wealth around.” In truth, Obama was talking for minutes on end about his economic and tax program -- one that would in fact help people like Joe who earn less than $250,000 per year. But Obama’s sometimes uncertain grip on the non-academic vulgate let those unfortunate socialist-sounding words trip right off his silver tongue. Bad move, Barry.

McCain immediately and skillfully turned them into effective campaign rhetoric: “He doesn’t understand that in America, we don’t spread the wealth, we create the wealth!” Good line, John.

This economic message could get traction in Florida and Pennsylvania and derail the Obama juggernaut. By shifting voters’ concerns away from the great sucking sound of the world financial crisis to their own taxes and jobs, McCain begins to look like he knows something about economics. And remember: without the stock market crash of the past weeks, Obama might not be so far ahead. On Oct. 2, McCain still had a small lead. Then came the economic disaster.

The second big mistake during the final lap of this election marathon is, of course, motor-mouth Joe Biden’s claim that “it will not be six months before the world tests Barack Obama like they did John Kennedy.” Bad move, Joe.

Kennedy was famously bested in his first meeting with Soviet strongman Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna, then failed to halt the Bay of Pigs debacle in Cuba -- both of which led to the brink of war over the Cuban missile crisis.

McCain is riding that one like a fleet horse. “I have been tested, my friends!” he shouts, literally thumping his chest. “I was a pilot on board the USS Enterprise [in 1962 off the coast of Cuba]. I was ready to go into combat at any minute. I know how close we came to a nuclear war.” The message and the contrast could not be more stark: Obama is the callow youth with no national security experience; McCain is the seasoned warrior.

Obama is finally paying the price for his dubious choice as a running mate of Sen. Biden, who is famous for his long and chronic habit of uttering damaging political gaffes. The wonder is that it took two months for a bad one to pop out. The question is whether it came too late -- or just in time -- to sink Obama’s ship.

But, hey, I also need to remember how wild and crazy this campaign is. You gotta love this one in Friday’s Washington Post: Kathleen Parker, one of those conservative turn-coats, thinks the fatal flaw in McCain’s campaign -- his choice of Sarah Palin as his running mate -- occurred because McCain’s “judgment may have been clouded” by Palin’s sexiness and beauty. Parker adduces scientific evidence that men go gaga around female beauty -- no surprise there -- and make short-term decisions with bad long-term consequences. Just think of Monica Lewinsky, Bill Clinton’s big downfall, she notes.

With factors like that to think about, surely anything can still happen. In American politics, 10 days is a lifetime. To quote a reader from the Spiegel Online forum: “Mysterious are the ways of the Lord -- and of the American voters.”