The U.S. 2008 Presidential Election: An Evaluation
by Rodrigue Tremblay
In his quite exhaustive analysis (excerpts below), Dr. Tremblay concludes
The 2008 American presidential election is a most unusual and interesting election, and it will be studied intensively in the coming years. My preliminary assessment is that this is still a presidential election for the Democrats to lose, but they may lose it, at least at the strategic presidential level.
For strategy, for instance, they would be wise to place less emphasis on the persona of Sen. Obama and his wife and more on issues. They must demonstrate to the American electorate that they are better prepared to tackle them, while their adversaries are likely to make matters worse.
Are Americans better off today than eight years ago? By most measures, they are not. It should be no surprise that Americans are eager for a change in leadership, especially as it is related to their number one preoccupation, the economy. If they were to vote for four more years of the same, it would only be by default. How could it be otherwise with the incumbent Republican George W. Bush having the [highest] disapproval rating (69%) ever of any American president?
Amazingly, however, the Democrats seem to have some problem zeroing in on a slogan. Perhaps they could adopt a slogan such as: “For a Better and More Prosperous America”. — I may be wrong, but I think that’s what a majority of Americans want.
Bomb, bomb, bomb Iran.
The issue of economics is not something I’ve understood as well as I should.. … I know a lot less about economics than I do about military and foreign policy issues. I still need to be educated.
I think that [to be rich] if you are only talking about income, how about $5 million?|
John McCain, 2008 Republican presidential candidate
Our national leaders are sending them [American soldiers to Iraq] out on a task that is from God. …That’s what we have to make sure that we’re praying for, that there is a plan and that plan is God’s plan.
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin (June 2008)
She’s not prepared to be governor. How can she be prepared to be vice president or president? Look at what she’s done to this state. What would she do to the nation? [About Gov. Sarah Palin, McCain’s choice for a running mate]
Lyda Green, Republican Alaska State Senate President
If my guesses are confirmed, then that raises the suspicion that somebody in the U. S. purposefully created this conflict [the August 7-8 Georgia-Russia conflict] with the aim of aggravating the situation and creating an advantage … for one of the candidates in the battle for the post of U.S. president.
Vladimir Putin, Russian Prime Minister and former President (August 28, 2008)
1. Let us start with the polls.
Three months ago, in mid June … the polls … showed Democratic candidate Sen. Barack Obama leading his Republican opponent Sen. John McCain by a comfortable margin. … A Saturday September 6 Gallup poll showed Obama leading McCain only by 47% to 45%, indicating that the two presidential tickets were statistically neck and neck after the two parties’ back-to-back conventions.
It should be mentioned that 10 times out of 12, the presidential ticket ahead after the conventions wins in November. But this year, poll data have to be analyzed in light of a likely negative “Bradley Effect” for the Obama-Biden ticket.
Therefore, the conclusion is clear: This is going to be a close U.S. presidential election, much closer than it should have been expected after eight years of crisis-prone Republican rule. Why is this so?
2. The Attacks on the Persona of the Democratic Candidate
… Sen. Obama is not your usual American presidential candidate. A junior U.S. senator with little administrative experience, he has to counteract the charge that he is inexperienced and untested. Not that his adversary, Sen. John McCain, has had much more administrative experience, but being younger, it is assumed that Sen. Obama is less experienced. Because of that, his choice of vice-presidential running mate was crucial. This was a test he could not afford to fail.
Sen. Obama is also the first person of African-American ancestry to run as a presidential candidate for one of the two dominant American political parties. … he does not fit totally with the image that many Americans have of their president. Indeed, it was said by some observers that some segments of the American public are not completely comfortable with candidate Obama and his convoluted personal history.
More importantly, perhaps, … Sen. Obama is considered a progressive and on the left of many domestic policy issues. This may be less of a handicap with the average American voter, who has suffered miserably under the rule of far right politicians, than it is with the neoconservative nomenklatura who control the levers of many propaganda machines.
It is obvious that there is a strong coalition of various interests that does not like the prospect of having Senator Obama become President Obama, and they are taking the necessary steps to attempt to deny him a victory [and] they have adopted the traditional Republican strategy of “attack and destroy.” That flawed candidate himself, Sen. John McCain has reached new lows in dirty campaigning, in smears and in political lies, even stooping as low as to accuse Sen. Obama of being responsible for high gas prices, while exonerating as culprits the incumbent Bush-Cheney administration, its ineffective energy policy and its wars of aggression.
3. The Obama Camp’s Weak Response
It is said that candidate Obama “conceded” the crucial month of August to his adversaries. To win, the Democrats cannot let the corrosive propaganda against them go unanswered, with only sporadic and weak rebuttals, while their opponent’s flawed record and character remain largely off screen.
… A question therefore must be raised: Is there an ongoing attempt from within the Democratic Party to sabotage Obama’s campaign? When something weird or unexplained happens, one has to ask if there is not a more rational reason that explains it.
4. The Republican Bag of Dirty Tricks
… How come the McCain machine has been so amazingly successful in controlling the debate, especially in having foreign affairs and security issues dominate the presidential election campaign, at a time when millions of Americans are losing their homes, when the economy is going through one of the worst financial and banking crisis and is in the midst of an economic slump?
… it certainly can be asked whether Sen. Barack Obama has not already been the victim of an astute and wicked “Wag the Dog” scheme. Such a scheme could have been designed by the Bush-Cheney White House to place foreign affairs and security matters front and center at a strategically important time in the U.S. presidential campaign, in the month of August, in order to bolster McCain’s campaign and help candidate McCain capitalize on his perceived advantage on such questions.
… Ever since Western countries supported the break-away of the territory of Kosovo from Serbia in February 2008, and created a precedent to be applied elsewhere, Georgia’s President Saakashvili knew perfectly well that Russia was prepared to react to any provocation in South Ossetia. … And with American and Israeli “advisers” on the ground in Georgia, we can rest assured that Saakashvili would never have sent Georgian tanks to South Ossetia without receiving some form of go-ahead signal from Washington.
… was it not … part of a plan designed to boost Sen. John McCain’s campaign for the American presidency, at a time when he was badly trailing in the polls? [We find this a particularly fascinating topic, in light of the viewpoint on Russia & Georgia we have posted]
5. An Assessment of the Republican Candidate
… The man is an old style militarist who confesses that he doesn’t know anything about economics. These are the worst attributes one would like to see in a leader at this time of economic and financial stress, and with costly lingering wars in far away Iraq and Afghanistan draining the public budget. He would be an interventionist president, who would gleefully start new wars, while his willingness to reinstitute the military draft would wreck havoc with thousands of families. That message does not seem to have been effectively conveyed to the American electorate. Why?
6. The Choice of Vice Presidential Candidates
Sen. Obama’s Vice Presidential choice [of Joe Biden, a Washington insider], while not a bad choice, was certainly a conservative one [leading to an] image in contradiction to that projected earlier by Sen. Obama when he was running for the Democratic nomination.
… The rationale, of course, was that an insider senator such as Sen. Biden would help an Obama administration deal with Congress …once elected. But before governing, one has to win the election. And on this score, it is questionable whether the chosen running mate was the best choice to unite a badly divided party between the Obama camp and the Clinton camp.
In a cynical and blatantly calculated political move, John McCain announced that he had chosen a relatively unknown and a relatively inexperienced woman. … Since according to Sen. McCain himself, he has no competence in economics or finance, one could have expected that he would have chosen someone better prepared in this crucial area. Instead, Sen. McCain chose a woman who has no background in economics or finance. Why? Essentially, because in the USA, religion trumps economics anytime. And, that’s the problem.
7. A Republican Ticket as the Religious Far Right Likes It
… what attracted candidate McCain to Sarah Palin was her far right religious credentials. … To get the evangelical vote, evangelical leaders had to be wooed. For the religious far right leaders … the only issue that really matters is for them to take absolute control of the U.S. Supreme Court in order to impose their far right domestic cultural agenda. … In 2008, if the flawed and controversial McCain – Palin ticket were to win, it would be due in a large measure to the same religious far right support.
People outside the United States must know such things if they are to understand American politics.
While it is true that the campaign that Sen. Hillary Clinton ran gave legitimacy to the possibility of a woman as president, this does not apply to any woman. Not to a woman because she is a woman. She has to be qualified for the job. In fact, the choice of Ms. Sarah Palin as his running mate and his sell-out to the far right may have been a major blunder on Sen. McCain’s part, because such a rash and impulsive decision puts his judgment in doubt.
Overall, religion continues to be the most politically divisive factor in the United States. Gallup found, for example, that nearly two thirds (65%) of highly religious American white voters would vote Republican, no matter what their interests in other issues are. They are one-issue voters and their political behavior explains to a large extent why relatively poor people and those of the middle class in the U.S. continue to vote for far right policies which mainly profit the rich. And that one single issue is an unhealthy desire to infuse religious dogma into the law of the land, no matter what the U. S. Constitution says about the division between Church and State and the requirement not to have a religious litmus test for any public office. The Constitution says one thing, but the churches say another. That explains why candidate McCain felt obliged to pander to the American religious right movement.
Since economic studies show that when Democrats were in the White House, lower-income American families experienced slightly faster income growth than higher-income families, and that the reverse was true when Republicans were in control, one would expect the Democrats to be favorite in this year of economic hardship. That is if people vote rationally their economic interests rather than voting along religious lines.
8. The “Bradley Effect” cannot be underestimated
Come November … the Obama-Biden ticket will have to be 2 or 3 percentage points ahead of the Republican ticket to counteract the expected “Bradley effect” in order to win.
9. Obama the Good One vs. McCain the Nasty One?
Finally, on the character issue, I have the feeling that there is some appearance of a lack of moral fortitude on the part of Candidate Obama. Some may have the impression that Sen. Obama is not his own man. That he says and does what others tell him to say and do and that this may explain his occasional flip-flops. This image, even if unfair and untrue, can be dangerous in politics because voters sometime value character above everything else in a candidate to public office.
On the other hand, even though John McCain has often been referred to ever since his high school days by those who know him well as John “McNasty”, the Democrats seem incapable of conveying this information about McCain’s character flaws to the public. If they do not do it themselves, they surely cannot rely on the neocon corporate media to do it in their place! So far, Obama’s advisers have been pulling their punches. They keep repeating that “You have to be careful about attacking McCain.” Well, the McCain camp has no such restraint in attacking Sen. Obama. They did exactly the same thing to Sen. John Kerry
In American politics, nice guys have the habit of finishing last.
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Rodrigue Tremblay is professor emeritus of economics at the University of Montreal and can be reached at rodrigue.tremblay@yahoo.com
He is the author of the book The New American Empire
Visit his blog site
