Seeking "Ordinary Americans"
Commentary: Can progressives can make issues like economic justice and cultural diversity sound like traditional American values?
July 29, 2008
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[Introduction by Tom Engelhardt]
All agree that this is (or should be) the year of the Democrats. But with candidate Barack Obama still leading, on average, in national polls by only about two to five percentage points, depending on the day, and the media proclaiming "oil" now a "Republican" issue, there's certainly a long way to go to that prospective Democratic victory on November 4th. Still, in retrospect, this last week may be seen as the one in which Senator McCain's campaign concluded that this might not only be the year of the Democrat, but of the Obamacrat as well, and went for the jugular.
Gallup polling, for instance, shows Obama making small but significant gains in every kind of state (red, purple, and blue) over the last two months. At the same time, Obama's world tour -- the one McCain and the neocons practically egged him into taking, with all those online tickers showing just how many days since he had last been to Iraq -- left the McCain camp in full and bitter gripe mode. In the imagery of advisor and former Senator Phil Gramm, they had become a campaign of "whiners." Meanwhile, the Berlin bounce finally showed up in the polls.
While Obama was wowing the Europeans, McCain managed to get an offshore-oil photo-op in the Gulf of Mexico wiped out by a somehow overlooked advancing hurricane. Instead, he ventured into a grocery store aisle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, prepped on rising food prices, where he met a "shopper planted by the local Republican Party" and experienced an unfortunate "applesauce avalanche." (The Daily Show version of this is not to be missed.) Not surprisingly, by week's end he was decisively skipping the "issues" and heading for "values" -- that is, directly for the throat in the style which Republicans have, in recent years, made their own.
Earlier in the week, he had practically declared his opponent treasonous for supposedly putting his political campaign ahead of victory in Iraq -- "It seems to me that Obama would rather lose a war in order to win a political campaign…" -- and launched a classic Republican campaign attack on Obama's "character." His latest ad, which attacks Obama for supposedly going to the gym rather than visiting wounded American soldiers in Germany, typically ends: "McCain, country first." (Versus… uh… Obama, country last?)
It's not exactly surprising that candidate McCain headed for what he hoped was potential "values" and "character" pay dirt (emphasis on "dirt") in tough times. As Ira Chernus -- canny TomDispatch regular and author of Monsters to Destroy: The Neoconservative War on Terror and Sin -- points out, it may be his only chance. The question is: Will it work?
Will "character," the culture wars, and security fears help elect the most woeful Republican candidate since Bob Dole -- and in a country that not only increasingly doesn't think much of Republicans, but has never cared to vote old? (Ronald Reagan was the exception to this rule, always running young and vigorous, whatever his age.) McCain, in a golf cart being piloted by 84-year-old George H.W. Bush, actually looked older than the former president. And, gee, you might go for the jugular early, too, in a year in which the Republicans don't even control the political machinery of the state of Ohio.
Now, let Ira Chernus take you on a magical mystery tour of the strange world of American "values," American "value voters," and a mainstream media that values the value-voter story above all else. Tom Engelhardt
Seeking: "Ordinary Americans"
Can progressives can make issues like economic justice and cultural diversity sound like traditional American values?
By Ira Chernus
While the Iraq war has largely faded from our TV screens, some 85% of all voters still call it an important issue. Most of them want U.S. troops home from Iraq within a couple of years, many of them far sooner. They support Barack Obama's position, not John McCain's. Yet when the polls ask which candidate voters trust more on the war, McCain wins almost every time.
Maybe that's because, according to the Pew Center for the People and the Press, nearly 40% of the public doesn't know McCain's position on troop withdrawal. In a June Washington Post/ABC poll, the same percentage weren't sure he had a clear position. When that poll told voters that McCain opposed a timetable for withdrawal, support for his view actually shot up dramatically. It looks like a significant chunk of the electorate cares more about the man than the issue. Newer polls suggest that McCain's arguments against a timetable may, in fact, be shifting public opinion his way.
McCain's Only Chance: Values-plus Voters
Pundits and activists who oppose the war in Iraq generally assume that the issue has to work against McCain because they treat American politics as if it were a college classroom full of rational truth-seekers. The reality is much more like a theatrical spectacle. Symbolism and the emotion it evokes -- not facts and logic -- rule the day.
In fact, the Pew Center survey found that only about a quarter of those who say they'll vote for McCain base their choice on issues at all. What appeals to them above all, his supporters say, is his "experience," a word that can conveniently mean many things to many people.
The McCain campaign constantly highlights its man's most emotionally gripping experience: his years of captivity in North Vietnam. Take a look at the McCain TV commercial entitled "Love." It opens with footage of laughing, kissing hippies enjoying the "summer of love," then cuts to the young Navy flier spending that summer of 1967 dropping bombs on North Vietnam and soon to end up a tortured prisoner of those he was bombing.
