Reihan Salam

Not what we were expecting

Reihan Salam on why a race between two post-partisan figures has ended up as such a bar fight

Why have Barack Obama and John McCain run such drearily conventional campaigns? Hard though it is to remember those halcyon days, informed observers once believed that Obama and McCain would barnstorm the country together, flying on the same plane and taking part in Lincoln–Douglas-style debates over war and peace and the meaning of life itself.

In fairness to both candidates, there has certainly been plenty of tactical innovation on both sides. Flush with money, the Obama campaign has embraced sophisticated technologies and management techniques. The McCain campaign has gone for death-defying stunts, up to and including the nomination of a largely unvetted unknown for vice president, that are far from dreary. Yet McCain is damning Barack Obama for wanting to raise taxes and increase spending, and for being soft on criminals and terrorists. Hardly novel. Remember that this is the McCain who opposed the Bush tax cuts for breaking the bank and for being too tilted towards the rich, which are all but identical to Obama’s objections.

One gets the distinct impression that McCain didn’t want to run an utterly ordinary campaign. Indeed, all evidence suggests that he wanted the pro-choice Democrat Joe Lieberman, who was Al Gore’s VP pick in 2000, as his running mate, a move that would have made the Republican National Convention a near-bloodbath.

McCain is addicted to dramatic gestures — one can easily imagine him challenging Obama to a duel — so the aggressiveness of his anti-Obama attacks is hardly surprising. The McCain campaign’s aggression reflects the candidate’s profound desire to save the country from the supposed danger posed by the mild-mannered Obama. It just so happens that the thrust of his attacks fit into a familiar left-right framework.

Obama, meanwhile, is accusing McCain of being a Bush clone while promising, during his lengthy laundry list that masqueraded as a speech to the Democratic National Convention, to provide Americans with cheap, domestically manufactured clean-coal-powered automobiles, or something to that effect.

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