Everyone seems to agree that John McCain had a very good night on Saturday. Some will inevitably play it up to be more than it was, others will try to minimize its importance as simply a perfectly designed forum for McCain’s speaking style, where he was addressing an audience that was more of his base than any other "debate" type event we’ll see this year.
I’m sure McCain will manage over the coming weeks to "gaffe away" any positive gains he made with independents and undecided voters this weekend, but that is not what worries me, and for the first time in six months, I’m genuinely worried about Obama’s prospects in November.
The reason is pretty simple. There have been several diaries in the past day or so that made the point that McCain may have performed well, but he didn’t really make any significant gains on Obama because he was really just speaking talking points to the right-wing of the Republican Party, and these are people who were not going to vote for Obama anyway. But there is a MAJOR hole in that logic.
The biggest advantage that Obama has always had in a matchup with McCain is NOT that Obama would win the battle for the independent vote. He may, he may not. Both candidates have a good deal of independent appeal. Obama’s greatest asset was that the far right really dislikes John McCain. I’ve always been confident that John McCain would never be able to pull the amount, or the intensity, of support from the far right, especially the evangelical wing of the GOP, that George Bush consistently has. The Christian right is to the Republicans what the netroots are to the Democrats. They are the most dedicated soldiers, the ideologues, the people who bring voters in on election day because they believe enough in the cause to spend their time and energy to get their candidate elected.
The enthusiasm from the Christian right was simply never there for John McCain, and not only were they not going to be willing to work as hard for him as they worked for George Bush, there were a significant number of die hards who would not even vote for McCain, they were so disgusted by him.
We should not be concerned about the people that McCain impressed on Saturday who would not have ever voted for Obama. We should be concerned about the people he impressed who would not have ever voted for McCAIN. Any right wing die hard who decides to actually pull the lever for McCain, rather than stay home, is a negative for Obama. Any right winger who decides that he will not merely vote for McCain, but will donate to McCain, is a negative for Obama. Any winger who decides to not merely donate to McCain, but to WORK for McCain is a MAJOR negative for Obama, because that is where McCain does begin to cut into the independent voters.
With the way Obama has been slipping in the polls, and with this possibly significant gain for McCain in the base of his party, I am genuinely worried for the first time in a long time. There seems to be one thing that has come out of this weekend that we can do to help blunt this blow. RUN WITH THAT SOLZHENITSYN STORY. The only thing that will take the shine off McCain’s performance in the eyes of evangelical voters is if they think that McCain was lying to them to try to prove he was more like them. I think he was, and we need to get this story out to the greater public. No doubt Olbermann will be running this story tonight, but we need to get it on CNN and the networks by the end of the week. I’m just telling everyone I know about it. Some people may have better connections than I do.