I’m in just about total agreement with TNR blogger and former Clinton fixer Howard Wolfson. Without serious attempts at working it into some overarching narrative about Obama’s political philosphy, the Ayers attacks will look like a particularly desperate attempt to obfuscate the financial crisis. This isn’t going to convert undecideds—not with the Dow dropping below 10,000 for the first time in four years, not with the massive international sell-offs that are now boggling the global currency market, and certainly not with the populist rage that any major economic crisis inevitably unleashes.
McCain should do tonight what he should have been doing since mid-June: tying Obama to the very worse aspects of American liberalism. It wouldn’t be hard to do, since the candidate hasn’t exactly distanced himself from them: he received thousands in contributions from a certain botched left-wing economics experiment. Fannie and Freddie are one of the current age’s most lurid examples of liberal social and economic experimentation gone horribly wrong, but Obama’s more damning tie is to a Democratic Congress that’s running a 16.8% approval rating. The concept of an Obama-Reid-Pelosi triumverate presiding over an allegedly $5 trillion spending spree should horrify moderates. And it shouldn’t horrify them nearly as much as the possibility of true one-party rule, especially when that party is gravitating towards policies that have historically worked against the long-term interest of most Americans: trade protectionism, command economics, potential payroll tax hikes, higher taxes on small businesses, etc.
And finally, there are the ties to Ayers, Wright and the leftist academy, ties that demonstrate Obama’s immersion in a world that runs counter to the American mainstream (remember the “cling” controversy?)—an immersion so thorough that Obama still considers a former close associate and potential ideological fellow like Ayers nothing but another “guy in the neighborhood.”
Had McCain attempted to paint Obama as a politically, culturally, and intellectually isolated left-wing ideologue—had he made some relatively intuitive links between Hyde Park cocktail parties with Rashid Khalidi and the potentially ruinous social and economic policies that an Obama presidency would enable—he would not be running a six-point deficit. This is not a “blue” nation—not by a long shot. And had he found some kind of balance between intellectually honest scare tactics and an emphasis on his almost unmatched Senate record, McCain could have avoided lapsing into the classic Rovian divide-the-American-public-and-conquer strategy that is, at this point, his only hope of getting elected president.