Palindrone

As little as a week ago, Alaska governor Sarah Palin seemed on track
to be an election-altering force, the VP pick who changed it all. But
things move fast in this new politico-media world, and the Palin swoon now seems like ancient history.

The media and public fascination with Palin was mainly a product of
Palin’s freshness on the political stage, her
low-expectations-surpassing performance at the Republican National
Convention, the way she temporarily reignited the gender wars and fired
up the evangelical base, and the clear bump that John McCain enjoyed,
post-Palin, in the polls.

In retrospect, though, Palin mania now looks less like a sign of how
perfectly cast she was and more like a reminder of how greatly McCain
benefits when the national conversation is not about him. A few big
investigative stories later (detailing Palin’s lies, her
vindictiveness, her censorious impulses toward her town’s library, and
even her purchase of a tanning bed) and the distraction she provides
isn’t quite so helpful to McCain. And, in the all-important poll watch,
Palin’s favorability ratings are dropping fast—down 12 points,
for example, in a recent Hotline poll.

* * *

On top of this, with the economy in crisis and McCain’s own economic
adviser, former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina, admitting on
September 16 that Palin doesn’t have the experience to run a major
corporation, the national focus has naturally swung back to McCain and
whether he’s the right man to run the country at a time when the
financial news sounds like a flashback to the eve of the Great
Depression.

This is, theoretically, favorable ground for Obama. Helpfully, the
McCain campaign kicked off a week of “financial crisis” news with
several unintentional gifts to his opponent.

First, at the very moment that most Americans were tuning in to the
crisis, McCain said, at an event in Florida, that “the fundamentals of
our economy are strong.” (By the next morning, the Obama campaign was
using video of the remark in an attack commercial that asked, “How can
John McCain fix our economy if he doesn’t understand it’s broken?”)
Then, by way of explaining how McCain was qualified to understand
modern financial markets and the mess they’re in, a McCain spokesman
claimed that McCain had “helped create” the “miracle” of the
BlackBerry. McCain has admitted he does not use e-mail and isn’t very
computer savvy.

Next, Fiorina, the McCain economic adviser who’d said Palin couldn’t
run Hewlett-Packard, tried for a quick save by contending that none of
the candidates—McCain included—was qualified to run a big
company. The Obama campaign’s lightning-fast response: “If John
McCain’s top economic adviser doesn’t think he can run a corporation,
how on earth can he run the largest economy in the world in the midst
of a financial crisis?”

With Palin firmly in the past and the financial crisis at the fore
of everyone’s attention, Obama is obviously relishing a new political
terrain that may force voters to cast aside gender politics, identity
politics, and religion, and answer the question: Who do you really want
in charge of America’s balance sheets?

* * *

We’ll know soon, via this election season’s relentless polling,
whether this new environment and Obama’s new strategy of attacking
McCain on economic issues at every opportunity becomes a success. On
its face, it seems like a winning tactic.

But here’s an ominous sign: A recent poll in the important swing
state of Ohio, conducted September 10 to 13, found that McCain is
leading Obama 46–42. Even worse: According to the Ohio poll,
voters simultaneously believe, by an 11-point margin, that Obama has
the better plan to bring jobs to the state, and that McCain, by an
8-point margin, is more trustworthy.

If what this really means is that a lot of voters, faced with
economic uncertainty and the fear it produces, just want an old white
guy to tuck them into bed at night and don’t want to roll the dice on
an African American whom they find “untrustworthy” (even if he has a
better economic plan), then Obama is in big trouble.

While everyone waits to see how the post-Palin battle over the
economy sorts out, mark your calendars: Another defining moment in the
dash toward November 4 will be the debates, which kick off on Friday,
September 26, in Oxford, Missouri.