David Brooks asks yesterday in The New York Times, "Why isn't Barack Obama doing better?"
A good friend of mine, Marc Caplan, had this to say about it...
Well, there’s a leading question if every there was one; who said he was doing all that badly to begin with? It’s like when Monty Burns said on returning from the Harvard-Yale game, "Oh honestly, Smithers, I don’t know why Harvard even bothered showing up this year: they hardly even won!"
In fact, let’s spin this the other way and pose the same question in reverse. Why isn’t John McCain doing better?
After all, he’s a bona fide American war hero, who has served his country with distinction in the Senate for over 20 years, amassing a venerable legislative record in the process. Moreover, for the past decade he has consistently been the single most popular politician among Independents in America, a position he has earned by bucking the trends of his party on campaign-finance reform and the corrupting role of lobbyists and pork-barrel spending in Washington; by making common and strategic cause with Democrats when it served the larger political good; and by not hesitating to criticize the president and his cabinet on crucial issues such as the support for veterans, the prosecution of the war in Iraq, and the use of torture at Guantanamo. With all that in consideration, plus the fact that he’s facing a completely untested candidate for national office with a funny name and exotic parentage, whose opponents for his party’s nomination were unable to state unequivocally whether he was or wasn’t a Muslim, shouldn’t McCain be looking right now at Eisenhower vs Stevenson-like landslides?
Why isn’t John McCain doing any better than he is? Maybe because in his quest for the presidency he has betrayed precisely the best principles that had previously made him a hero to so many independent-minded voters: instead of standing up to lobbyists, he has curried their favor; instead of challenging the pernicious social agenda of the radical religious right, he has embraced some of their most lunatic representatives; instead of reversing the Bush administration’s disastrous fiscal policies, he has promised to maintain them; instead of correcting the reckless military policies of Rumsfeld and Rice, he has tied his entire political fortune to extending them indefinitely. All of which is to say that unlike Obama, McCain has revealed himself to be more politician than independent thinker, more interested in solidifying his party base by appealing to the lowest common denominator than standing up for his principles or the interests of the American voter.
It doesn’t take a lot of rhetorical cleverness or a regular column in The New York Times to see through this act. And it doesn’t take a lot of nebulous speculations about biographical background or personal proclivities to recognize who is the best candidate for president.