A bad polling news hailstorm has now hit Republican candidate Sen. John McCain’s campaign, as typified by a new Pew poll that finds Democratic Sen. Barack Obama widening his lead and getting higher marks than before for his leadership.
It comes within a context of Obama taking the lead in some key states, signs that GOP Vice Presidential candidate Gov. Sarah Palin is turning out to be more of an anchor than a propeller for the McCain campaign, plus a new poll showing President George Bush setting a historic low number in his approval rating. The good news for McCain: another new poll that shows Obama in the lead shows his one key flaw is that fewer than 50 percent feel Obama would make a good Commander In Chief of the military.
Barack Obama has achieved a significant lead over John McCain in the days following the first presidential debate. Pew’s new survey conducted Sept. 27-29 finds that Obama has moved to a 49% to 42% advantage among registered voters. The race was virtually even in mid-September and early August. Obama had not led McCain by a significant margin in a Pew survey since June.
The latest national poll by the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press, conducted among 1,505 adults (including 1,258 registered voters) by landline and cell phone, suggests that three factors appear to be favoring Obama. First, more voters rate Obama’s performance in last Friday’s debate as excellent or good than say the same about McCain’s (72% vs. 59%). Obama’s leadership image also has improved. There is now almost no difference in the minds of voters as to which candidate would use better judgment in a crisis.
This makes it harder for McCain to sell the idea that Obama would be a dangerous risk as leader. He has to either go after Obama on policy differences, or some kind of peripheral potential “game changer” such a Joe Biden Vice Presidential gaffe that consumes the news cycle and makes Biden an issue.
Second, the electorate continues to have much more confidence in Obama than McCain to deal with the financial crisis, which is dominating the public’s attention at levels usually associated with wars and natural disasters. Obama also has widened his lead as the candidate best able to improve the overall economy, from nine points in mid-September to 18 points currently (51% to 33%).
It’s increasingly hard for McCain to sell himself as the solution to the country’s economic ills due to the events of last week, highly-negative press and pundit (even Republican pundit) coverage, Republicans controlling the White House and Republican House votes in the bailout being the key trigger that caused the recent Wall Street whopping nosedive.
And if Obama faces a risk from Biden, McCain is (at this writing at least) hamstrung by Palin:
Third, opinions about Sarah Palin have become increasingly negative, with a majority of the public (51%) now saying that the Alaska governor is not qualified to become president if necessary; just 37% say she is qualified to serve as president. That represents a reversal of opinion since early September, shortly after the GOP convention. At that time, 52% said Palin was qualified to step in as president, if necessary.
McCain also has an ongoing problem every time President George Bush appears on the TV screen: although he is trying to distance himself from Bush, he still has an “R” in front of his name and Bush’s political stock is crashing faster than the stock market. A new ABC News/Washington post poll has Obama ahead of McCain 50-46. And it has this bad news for McCain:
McCain’s laboring under the Bush legacy. With the current economic situation, a record 70 percent of Americans disapprove of George W. Bush’s job performance; a career-low 26 percent approve.
Just two presidents have had lower approval (Richard Nixon and Harry Truman) than President Bush, and none has had higher disapproval in polls since 1938.
McCain’s problem: Fifty-three percent of registered voters think he’d lead the country in the same direction as Bush, inching back up over a majority.
The obvious conclusion: Obama and the Democrats will keep hammering at McCain being a Republican and the number of votes he has cast on Bush policies. Each time he echoes the White House, it’ll become part of the political mantra.
Forty-eight percent of registered voters are uncomfortable about McCain’s age, a new high. And while Obama has advanced since mid-June in the sense that he’s a “safe” choice for president, to 55 percent, McCain has lost ground on this measure; 51 percent now see him as safe, down 6 points.
Obama continues to trounce McCain on enthusiasm. Sixty-one percent of Obama’s supporters are very enthusiastic about their choice, vs. 38 percent of McCain’s.
For all that, Obama does not have the race in the bag.
Though more registered voters say Obama than McCain won Friday’s debate, Obama has not progressed in the sense that he’d make a good commander-in-chief of the military, and remains under 50 percent in this measure.
What does all of this mean? Dick Polman has a MUST-READ. Here is just a tiny part of it:
The modern conservative movement – founded on a philosophical hostility to government – has largely exhausted itself, thanks to the excesses of those cowboys who were allowed to roam free, constructing a caricature of the capitalist system. A new chapter in our national saga is at hand. Many Americans, including swing voters, are not necessarily fans of strengthened government intervention (indeed, as well know, the government screws up a lot), but, as in 1933, Americans look to government in times of serious crisis. This is one of those times – and most polls suggest that this sentiment is buoying Barack Obama’s prospects.
….Some kind of rescue plan is still likely to pass. And regarding the potential long-term political fallout, conservative commentator Ross Douthat writes: “This is still George W. Bush’s economy. Republicans who think the public will blame the Democrats, and specifically a President Obama, if the bailout is massively unpopular come 2010 or 2012 are almost certainly kidding themselves. Whether it succeeds or fails, the bailout seems likely to be remembered as the last great fiasco of the Bush Era, not the first big-government fiasco of a new liberal moment, and there’s very little the Republicans can do to change this.”
The last great fiasco of the Bush era…with similarities to the fiascos of the Hoover era. The national zeitgeist is shifting and, if Obama wins this election, conservatives will be forced to seriously reexamine their precepts. It will no longer be enough to declare hostility to government, or to assume that cutting taxes is a sufficient government action.
As conservative thinker (and former Bush speechwriter) David Frum argues in his new book, “There are things only government can do, and if we conservatives wish to be entrusted with the management of government, we must prove that we care enough about government to manage it well.”
Read it in its entirety…
Cartoon by Pat Bagley, Salt Lake Tribune
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.