The Democrats’ challenge: Turning the election from a referendum on Obama into a choice between Obama and McCain

Everything this year seems to have aligned for the Democrats. The incumbent Republican president is deeply unpopular, more than three quarters of voters think the country is on the wrong track, the economy is in trouble and the conservative coalition is fracturing. But still the presidential race is tight; there aren’t more than a couple of points in it. The explanation for this is quite simple: the election has moved from being a referendum on the Bush years to a referendum on Barack Obama. The extent to which Obama dominates the media coverage of the campaign means that the most important thing in deciding your vote is what you think of Obama. This is what explains why quite so many Clinton Democrats are supporting McCain. Cleverly, the McCain campaign has realised this works to its favour.

It has stopped raging against the media’s obsession with Obama and is instead feeding it with a string of critical ads and direct attacks. All this is rapidly turning Obama into the incumbent, worrying the life out of the Democrats who know that undecided voters tend to break for the challenger and that Obama’s margin isn’t big enough to deal with this. Over the next three nights, the Democrats have to try and turn this into a choice between Obama and McCain. (Next week, the Republicans will talk almost incessantly about Obama in an effort to keep the spotlight on the Democrat).

This is going to require the Obama campaign to retool. In this new environment, many of Obama’s strengths—his ability to dominate the news, the power of his rhetoric and the fascination with his candidacy—are now weaknesses. It is going to have to go negative on McCain, a difficult candidate to attack in personal terms because of the heroism of his military service. The real test of this convention will not be the size of the polling bounce Obama receives but whether or not it does permanent damage to McCain’s favourability ratings. Ironically, if the Democrats had nominated a less compelling candidate, a moderate technocrat say like Mark Warner, the former Virginia governor who is tonight’s keynote speaker, or Evan Bayh, the former governor of Indiana and now a Senator, they might well be in better shape. But these less exciting politicians were all scared out of the race by the presence of Clinton and Obama, two candidates who swallowed up nearly all the available oxygen.