In the wake of the second presidential debate between Democratic Sen. Barack Obama and Republican Sen. John McCain, both campaigns now seem to be fine-tuning and refocusing, as a new Gallup Daily tracking poll now shows Obama has opened up an 11 point lead over the Arizona Senator.
The poll comes in the wake of an accelerated McCain push to take the focus off the economic issue and put it on raising doubts about Obama’s character — and one day after the debate which few felt was a barn-burner for either candidate, and some pundits called one of the most boring and worst-formatted presidential debates ever. But the new poll numbers suggest McCain’s new negative strategy hasn’t significantly reversed his southwards polling trend and isn’t winning over non-Republican voters:
The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking report shows Barack Obama with a 52% to 41% lead over John McCain.
These results, based on Oct. 5-7 polling, are the best for Obama during the campaign, both in terms of his share of the vote and the size of his lead over McCain.
Nearly all interviews in today’s report were conducted before Tuesday night’s town hall style debate in Nashville. Any movement in voter preferences as a result of this debate will be apparent in coming days.
Voter preferences seem to have stabilized for the moment, as Obama has held a double-digit lead over McCain in each of the last three individual nights of polling.
Some key states are also breaking Obama’s way. Obama has opened up a 10 point lead in Wisconsin. Polls show some swing states leaning to Obama in an election that has most assuredly not been decided yet. Rasmussen Reports’ poll continues to show Obama in the lead, but largely unchanged from before.
Two key elements seem to be occurring now in Obama’s and in McCain’s campaigns:
OBAMA CAMPAIGN
1. Obama is starting to move resources to states where he feels he has a chance to pull off a win. The most glaring: Florida. Marc Ambinder:
The Obama campaign’s top two field generals have decamped to Florida, a sign of its confidence that the state, with 27 electoral votes, is tilting toward the Democratic candidate.
Steve Hildebrand, the deputy campaign manager, will oversee operations from Miami, and Paul Tewes, the chief general election strategist, will help supervise the get-out-the-vote program from the campaign’s state headquarters in Tampa.
Tewes, the Obama campaign’s liaison with the Democratic National Committee, arrived today, a colleague said. Both will work with Obama state director Steve Schale, who has put together the biggest field team ever field by a party, Republican or Democratic. There are more than 50 open field offices and more than 10,000 active volunteers. In addition, the Obama campaign is outspending McCain on television in the expensive state by a factor of five to one, records show.
With an aircard, both Hildebrand and Tewes can do their jobs from anywhere, and they will continue to oversee the national operation. Their physical presence serves as a force multiplier effect, letting volunteers and canvassers know that the campaign considers their work vital.
Other senior staff members will be dispatched to other battleground states soon.
Analysis: Not A Defensive Move
Meanwhile, there are reports that Obama may roll out a big gun more powerful than a team of operatives heading to Florida: Oprah Winfrey.
2. Obama keeps hammering on the themes of the economy and telling rallies that McCain’s campaign people have been quoted as saying they want to change the subject from the economy to personal attacks on him.
MCCAIN CAMPAIGN:
1. The campaign is refocusing on the economic issue amid signs that it may pull back on the personal attacks. The Politico:
McCain’s decision to use Tuesday’s debate to roll out a dramatic new housing plan – and to downplay an extended weekend of personal attacks on Obama – appeared to mark a recognition that, after two consecutive days of the Dow plummeting and financial hemorrhaging abroad, the market meltdown is not likely to move from the center of the campaign.
After days of attempts to persuade voters that Obama’s ties to ‘60s radical Bill Ayers are a crucial character issue, McCain didn’t mention Ayers’ name during the 90 minutes of Tuesday’s forum. His top aides suggested afterward that, going forward, the candidate wouldn’t focus on the former domestic terrorist nor invoke the name of Obama’s controversial pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Nicolle Wallace, a top McCain adviser, hinted McCain would not bring it up. “If asked about it, of course [he’ll talk about Ayers],” she said.
Which means when he appears on Sean Hannity tonight, it will likely be raised by Hannity and addressed.
McCain’s chief strategist, Steve Schmidt all but said the controversial pastor remained off-limits.
“What Sen. McCain has said is that it’s not an issue he intends to talk about in the race,” said the aide, though he did note that Obama himself had called Wright ‘fair game.’
But don’t expect the McCain campaign to play patty-cake or host a C-SPAN-like debate with Obama yet. Cindy McCain ripped into Obama at a warm up, essentially questioning how much Obama cares for the troops (such as her son).
The Los Angeles Times’ Elizabeth Snead scoffs at suggestions that McCain won’t do a negative campaign..
2. The McCain campaign shows no signs of trying to push back some of the inflammatory, rage-filled responses of some audience members as McCain and Palin go negative on Obama. Today’s latest: someone at a McCain rally yelled out “Off with his head!” in reference to Obama.
Calls of “traitor,” “terrorist,” “Kill him!” and “Off with his head” take American discourse to a new low level and those who were alive during the 1960s remember some of the tragic consequences of strong political hatreds.
The problem for the McCain campaign: is its main mission trying to further solidify its Sean Hannity-Rush Limbaugh type conservative base or win over independent voters and voters more concerned about the economy than allegations about someone’s personal associations? And shouldn’t these allegations have been injected in August since October is the time for the campaign’s closing argument to the electorate?
What to watch: polls in coming days which show whether the negative campaigning has worked and the impact of the second debate.
But McCain’s negative campaign is extracting a price: signs of a potential split in the Republican party among those concerned over its negativity and attack against people who in other times might be considered thoughtful.
David Frum, writing on NRO, says he’s voting for McCain and explains why, listing McCain’s strong points. He then writes (worth quoting in full here):
We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama’s associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don’t care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.
Republicans used negative campaigning successfully against Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, it’s true. But 1988 and 2004 were both years of economic expansion, pro-incumbent years. 2008 is like 1992, only worse. If we couldn’t beat Clinton in 1992 by pointing to his own personal draft-dodging and his own personal womanizing, how do we expect to defeat Obama in a much more anti-incumbent year by attacking the misconduct of people with whom he once kept company (but doesn’t any more)?
Here’s another thing to keep in mind:
Those who press this Ayers line of attack are whipping Republicans and conservatives into a fury that is going to be very hard to calm after November. Is it really wise to send conservatives into opposition in a mood of disdain and fury for the next president, incidentally the first African-American president? Anger is a very bad political adviser. It can isolate us and push us to the extremes at exactly the moment when we ought to be rebuilding, rethinking, regrouping and recruiting.
I’m not suggesting that we remit our opposition to a hypothetical President Obama. Only that an outgunned party will need to stay cool. A big part of Obama’s appeal is his self-command. It’s a genuinely impressive quality. Let’s emulate it. We’ll be needing it.
And the New York Time’s conservative columnist David Brooks, quoted in The Huffington Post, points to the key McCain surrogate for the harshest most negative attacks, Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin, who is Nirvana to Republican activists and talk show hosts but to many Democrats and independent voters comes across as a mixture of Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, with distinct influences of the school of Lee Atwater-Karl Rove polarization politics. Brooks’ comments are most noteworthy:
[Sarah Palin] represents a fatal cancer to the Republican party. When I first started in journalism, I worked at the National Review for Bill Buckley. And Buckley famously said he’d rather be ruled by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the Harvard faculty. But he didn’t think those were the only two options. He thought it was important to have people on the conservative side who celebrated ideas, who celebrated learning. And his whole life was based on that, and that was also true for a lot of the other conservatives in the Reagan era. Reagan had an immense faith in the power of ideas. But there has been a counter, more populist tradition, which is not only to scorn liberal ideas but to scorn ideas entirely. And I’m afraid that Sarah Palin has those prejudices. I think President Bush has those prejudices.
Frum and Brooks are more of the Goldwater/Reagan school of Republicanism — which was what McCain was in his 2000 incarnation. In 2008, McCain morphed more into a Bush-style Republican — big government, unhappy warrior, and quick to employ divisive, hot-button, polarizing and demonizing politics.
If McCain wins, that’ll be the pattern for the GOP for some more years to come. That will be the face of the Republican Party.
If McCain loses, the true battle will be on for the political soul of the Republican Party.
But right now, with only four weeks left to go, the GOP is battling to recalibrate its Presidential campaign to stay politically alive amid strategies that don’t seem to be catching on yet amid sagging state and national polls that show it’s still in a tough race against “that one…”
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.