The general election is in full swing. Almost everyone in our small corner of the world has written of it, at least briefly. My turn again.
I do not believe the context or details of the election has changed fundamentally in the last 10 months. Clinton self-destructed, Giuliani never got out of the blocks, and I would not have picked McCain as the nominee. I still think McCain is a good man. I still disagree with many of his positions. The extent to which his only a shadow of the candidate he was 8 years ago (even before he locked the nomination) has only become more clear. I still think it obvious that Obama will win in November, by four percentage points or more. Here is why:
-Bush. History stands clear. There have been two times in the last 75 years when a party has held the presidency for three consecutive terms; FDR, and Reagan-Bush I. (I do not count Nixon-Ford for obvious reasons.) FDR remains one of our greatest five presidents, and Reagan was voted Greatest American of the 20th Century. Bushes numbers recall those of Nixon and Andrew Johnson.
-Obama. He is a paradigmatic American public figure, in both a modern and historical sense. He has lived the American dream and harnessed it in the public eye as no candidate has since TR, if not Andrew Jackson (who invented this kind of politics). Bill Clinton came close, but Obama is actually not-white.
Beyond all this, he has proven throughout the campaign that he is exactly the sort of person who should be president. He has ran an extraordinarily tight and effective ship, and what is the president but the Chief Executive Officer of our country? Clinton (both of them) had substantive flaws in this respect, and McCain fails utterly. Shrub has shown us the dark side of this aspect of contemporary America.
Obama has also proven himself as a leader. The factor that will give Obama his cushion over McCain, that which has not existed with Gore or Kerry, that which Frank Rich finally covered yesterday? People like me. Young folks who never get called for polls, are not part of the traditional machine, and thus not meaningfully on the radar of most pundits. The speech of Thursday was the greatest convention moment since FDR flew (in a plane!) to accept the nod in ’32 in person for the first time. McCain and Ken Mehlman pee themselves before they go to sleep every night at a stadium full of 80,000 supporters the GOP could never get.
As evidence I present the leading photo. Notice that this was in 2004. Things have only gotten better since.
-McCain. Most of this was covered above or is so obvious it hardly bears restating. He’s old, and America has been a country of youth since the early 18th century. AARP hasn’t taken over yet. He gets mad in a way that people should in a post-Cheney era worry over. He is not someone people feel being president. Obama wasn’t, but that’s largely been addressed in the last 2 months. The debates have the potential to influence this in interesting ways.
-Palin. It certainly shows “maverick” cred, but this isn’t Top Gun. She may well be an Obama or Bill Clinton caliber political mind and soul (BC was younger than Palin when he was elected.), but McCain dragged her out of the back woods, and she has yet to show any evidence that she was seeking out such a chance. Being president requires a hubris, to engage in impossible decision making on a monarchical level. 98% of the country is terrified of Sarah Palin in that position, and I do not think she can fix that, because I think the majority is correct.
The pandering women thing is just callous, and will loose more votes than it gains.
To put un-needed nails in the coffin, there is also the historic shift in the meaning of conservativism that is beginning to build momentum. The narrative of liberalism v. conservativism predates the Articles of Confederation, made a big time resurgence in the decades before the Civil War, again over the industrial around the last turn of the century, and once more with Reagan. The question is one of Federalism, of states rights, of local control. If government is given 10 units of power, how many do we give the states, and how many the national, governments? In a country before paved roads, railroads, telegraphs, and so forth, the idea that local people should make local choices held a lot of water. Every technological innovation has poked holes in that, and the extent to which such innovations has since WWII flattened the world the made the discrete boundaries of countries less politically, economically, and socially relevant. Now national interest arguments and zenophobia are beginning to sound like states rights rhetoric in the 1840’s. The conservative voices in America will have to do much better than knee-jerk neoconism if they wish to not go the way of the Whigs. The Republicans are also running the risk of being caught on the wrong side of social issues in the next half-century. Once the baby boomers die off, only a few isolated pockets of Christian fanatics will give a damn about gay marriage. The abortion rights debate will be radically reframed. The GOP has already been scrambling to do damage control on the environment (Palin’s going to help on this one (cough)), and will likely continue to do so on social issues.
In a bigger world, with more people, we will need more government. Get used to it.
McCain has, and will, not. And thus he will perish. He’ll loose in November, and will be unseated by Napolitano in 2010.
As John McLaughlin says: “Bye bye!”
Bedrock & Paradox 
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