What a nice article.
BETWEEN THE LINES
Jonathan Alter
Crushed by the Elephant
Picking Palin was a confession that McCain did not have control of the Republican Party.
Published Oct 11, 2008
From the magazine issue dated Oct 20, 2008
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In a season of ironies, the greatest of all might be that John McCain lacks the toughness to get elected president. During the summer, when he had his best chance, he wasn't tough enough to remake the Republican Party in his own image; instead, he surrendered to a cynical assortment of lobbyists and right-wingers who insisted on a strategic blunder that McCain would recognize from his reading of military history—fighting the last war. In 2004 President Bush won by rallying the base and destroying the Democrat as unpatriotic. They would try to do it again.
But the free-market party of Reagan is dead (thanks to the financial crisis) and the resentment party of Nixon (in the form of the ugly attacks unleashed by McCain and Sarah Palin) may find that its best days are behind it. Where is the party of McCain? The man who survived five and a half years as a Vietnam POW and a thousand political battles is being crushed by a dying elephant.
Sure, the market would likely be melting down McCain's campaign no matter what he did. But he'd have a better chance if he canned the character attacks on Barack Obama. Aside from being offensive and desperate, they don't work with undecided voters. And they're confusing to McCain's own stoked-up partisans, as he found in Minnesota last week, when he told a woman who said she was scared by Obama, because he was "Arab," that she was wrong and his opponent was actually a "decent family man." McCain's own crowd then booed him.
But most voters this year aren't much interested in William Ayers or other distractions. Times are bad and the greedheads are to blame. "They know only the rules of a generation of self seekers," Franklin D. Roosevelt said in his 1933 Inaugural Address, referring to the GOP thinking of the 1920s. "They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish."
Roosevelt's biblical references, as he rallied the country against "fear itself" during the last banking crisis, underscored the break he was making from the Grand Old Party of Coolidge and Hoover. Obama would likely do the same. "The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization," FDR said. "We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit."
Restoration. It's a powerful vision, and one that McCain understood in 2002 when he tried to force the money contributors from their high seats in the Capitol as part of McCain-Feingold campaign-finance reform. In those days, McCain built a powerful independent brand in American politics. He recognized that the conservative movement was going off the rails. He voted against Bush's tax cuts for the wealthy because they offended his "conscience," and talked with Tom Daschle about sitting with the Democrats in the Senate and with John Kerry about going on the 2004 Democratic ticket.
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