It's Not the Stupidity, Stupid

As Barack Obama's spokesman accuses John McCain of "the sleaziest and least honorable campaign in modern presidential campaign history," he is giving Republicans exactly what they want--shifting the focus of the election to personalities and tactics from what should be the main issue.

Ronald Reagan put it succinctly to voters in 1980: "Are you better off than you were four years ago?" The answer was a resounding no, and he swept a sitting president out of office.

This year the answer to the question, "Are you better off than you were eight years ago?" is so obvious and compelling that some in the Obama campaign seem to be acting on the assumption that it wouldn't be cool to keep harping on it.

They need a wakeup call similar to James Carville's 1992 reminder, "It's the economy, stupid" that saved Bill Clinton's effort against Bush 41 by keeping it on message: "It's not the stupidity, stupid."

It isn't the smear ads against Obama, the coded racial attacks that label him "different," the cynical selection of Sarah Palin, the McCain transition from straight talk to double talk. Those side shows are distractions from the main point that McCain has morphed into another Bush and is getting away with the claim that he represents change.

An ocean away, this seems clearer. The Sunday Telegraph quotes a Democratic Party official: "I really find it offensive when Democrats ask the Republicans not to be nasty to us, which is effectively what Obama keeps doing. They know that's how the game is played."

Of course, the smears and lies have to be addressed and swatted away like flies at a picnic, but that's the part-time work of staff and surrogates. Obama now is spending too much of his own time talking about "them" and what "they" are doing instead of telling voters what he will do to undo what the last eight years have brought them--loss of jobs, homes and health care to a wrong-headed war that has squandered lives and billions of dollars to the point of making most Americans despair about the future.

Obama himself seems to know that. "The McCain-Palin ticket," he said yesterday, "they don't want to debate the Obama-Biden ticket on issues because they are running on eight more years of what we've just seen. And they know it. As a consequence, what they're going to spend the next seven, eight weeks doing is trying to distract you."

He should remind his own staff, too.

The Inertia Issue

As much as Americans want something new in Washington, Barack Obama's promise of change is colliding with doubts, not all of them raised by attack ads, across the political spectrum.

A new poll reported by the Washington Post shows Obama with a 2 to 1 edge over John McCain among low-wage workers, but "many are unconvinced that either presidential candidate would be better than the other at fixing the ailing economy or improving the health-care system."

At the other end of the political spectrum, George Will in his Post column chides Obama for overblown rhetoric, while conceding that his hero Ronald Reagan was also "incorrigibly fond of perhaps the least conservative, and therefore the most absurd, proposition ever penned by a political philosopher, Thomas Paine's 'we have it in our power to begin the world over again.' No. We. Don't."

In classic conservative mode, Will claims "sweeping changes are almost always calamitous consequences of calamities...Wise voters...hanker for candidates whose principal promise is that they will do their best to muddle through without breaking too much crockery."

But after eight years that produced an unwise war and a damaged economy, both Will and his doubting low-income counterparts may want to look back to the time when Americans put their trust in a president who overhauled a failing financial system with the FDIC and SEC, saved farmers from the Dust Bowl and created Social Security for the destitute old, among other "changes."

Obama may turn out to be no FDR as McCain certainly wouldn't be, but this year is more like 1932 than Reagan's 1980, and "muddle through" won't quite cut it. Inertia is tempting, but it works better in a time such as Eisenhower's with a booming economy after winning a worldwide war. Now there is broken crockery to be swept up.

The Kennedying of Obama: Cautionary Note

In the desperation to be rid of Bush, this has become a year of imagery shorthand. While any Republican with a pulse claims to be another Reagan, Barack Obama is seen as a new JFK.

There are parallels. As Nixon did in 1960, Hillary Clinton is invoking her experience during the eight-year tenure of a popular president. But in both cases, the actual occupant of the Oval Office undermined the chances of his would-be successor.

Eisenhower did nothing as blatant as Bill Clinton's campaign antics but, in trying to help his Vice-President in 1960, he asserted that Nixon played a major role during his terms in office. Asked at a press conference about any piece of advice he had heeded, Eisenhower answered, "If you give me a week, I might think of one."

In that campaign, as Frank Rich reminds us today, neither could Kennedy point to any significant achievement in his brief Senate career, but what he offered was change in a time when Americans were ready but not as desperate as they are now for new, younger leadership.

If anything, in his style and emphasis on rational exploration of every issue, Obama is less like Kennedy than Adlai Stevenson, another figure from Illinois, who lost twice to Eisenhower.

Stevenson, who once defined a politician as "someone who approaches every question with an open mouth," was reluctant, as Obama is now, to offer bumper-sticker solutions on every issue. But Stevenson was up against an American legend, and Obama is offering a poetic vision much like Kennedy's as an alternative to the Clintons' mixed legacy.

As he prepares to collide with them on Super Tuesday, Obama might want to recall something else Stevenson said: “The hardest thing about any campaign is how to win without proving you’re unworthy of winning.”