Monday, March 17, 2008

White, Whole Wheat or Rye?   [Lisa Schiffren]

Derb and Robbins are right:  Obama is toast. There is no coming back from this either. If he repudiates his affiliation to Wright's church he is sure to suffer with his African-American base, who will see him as too willing to listen to white critics. If he defends it, whites who felt comfortable with him, in part because he wasn't throwing anger and guilt at them, will leave.  Because of the delegate structure he still may get the nomination. If he does, the coy act, where all of his core beliefs are kept locked away, with no paper trail to betray them, will not hold. As we are now seeing, our new-age candidate has a cliched, solid far left voting record, with all of the usual bits of sleaze that even ambitious politicians don't forego. Earmarks for his wife's employer, anyone? 

Of course Hillary is the obvious beneficiary of his fall, and she may yet pull out the nomination. No matter. The numbers of voters who have sworn to pollsters that they would not vote for her no matter what, has hovered slightly above 50 percent forever. And, there will be a lot of angry Obama voters who won't show up for her.

So, with full knowlege that anything could change and this could look like a ridiculous prediction, right this minute it's McCain's to lose.  One way he could do that would be to ignore the full gravity of our precarious current economy.  Because he has let it be known that he is far more interested in, and comfortable with, foreign policy than domestic, he now needs to overcome that limitation by bringing out some of his economic advisors, and  making some serious statements. He should offer a coherent analysis of how he sees the problem, on Wall Street and on Main Street, and the beginnings of policy ideas on how to address those problems. This is tricky at a moment when the Fed is scrambling, and "unknown unknowns" are surfacing. He should not be afraid to discuss a potential recession.  He can run against current White House policies, if need be. And it is critical to avoid looking "out of touch."

I'd like to see him push campaign advisor and former Senator Phil Gramm front and center, as a surrogate. Gramm is more than capable of speaking intelligently, and reassuring voters and markets that McCain is thinking about the economy. I hope a new cadre of policy-oriented finance-and economics-types are being recruited as surrogates by the campaign as this unfolds.

03/17 02:17 PMShare