Ugliness of 2008 could doom hopes in four years

10/12/09
John McCain, you could argue, had no choice. He saw he was on pace to lose this election, his last shot at the presidency. He wants to win, so he apparently thought he had to resort to unsavory tactics.

He has nothing to lose. His reputation will be fine; no matter what happens, he will be welcome on every Sunday morning talk show as long as he wants to show up. Why not pull out all the stops?

Sarah Palin, though, is in a different position. She’s young enough, and already popular enough, to be part of the national political scene for the next 25 years. It might behoove her, regardless of November’s result, not to provoke more than half the country into a rage at the sight of her.
Maybe she just can’t help it.

As it stands, McCain is in serious trouble. Barack Obama has solid leads in every state John Kerry won four years ago, in addition to a pair of Al Gore states, Iowa and New Mexico. That means, barring catastrophe elsewhere, McCain has to run the table on the following states — Florida, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Indiana, Missouri and Colorado. Every one of them shows either an Obama lead or looks to be a toss-up. If Obama takes even one of them, he wins the election.

That doesn’t mean McCain and Palin should give up. But there are limits.

McCain’s ads have long pushed the boundary of truth, but he broke new ground last month with a spot that claimed Barack Obama supported "comprehensive sex education" for kindergartners. It was actually a bill in support of teaching children to be alert for inappropriate advances from adults — the kind of thing they teach in the Cub Scouts.

Palin, as vice presidential candidates are wont to do, is leading the attacks, calling Obama "someone who sees America, it seems, as being so imperfect that he’s palling around with terrorists who would target their own country."

It’s a reference to a ’60s radical who has sporadically crossed paths with Obama over the years. By this logic, half the city of Chicago has been "palling around with terrorists," but never mind. Guilt by association is all that matters here.

She’s reveling in the ugliest corner of her party’s support. Rallies over the past week have featured backers yelling racial epithets, calling Obama a terrorist and worse. She has shown not the slightest indication any of this was a problem for her. (Nor, it should be noted, has a certain Connecticut senator on stage with her at a few of these events.)

Palin was in a position to be, in the event of a McCain loss, the leading contender for the 2012 Republican nomination. But she’s turned off so many voters in the last month that her party may decide she’s too toxic to take a chance on. They don’t nominate rabid partisans; George W. Bush ran from the Republican brand as a "compassionate consevative" — he wasn’t one, but he pretended to be — and McCain has based his entire candidacy on a willingness to go his own way.

What seems likely is that Palin, her relative youth aside, knows that this, too, is her best and only shot at bigger things. The more people find out about her, the less popular she gets. Her favorability rating dropped from plus-20 a month ago to around minus-10 today.

Her routine has already run its course, and there are signs of trouble in her home state of Alaska. The local media is not amused by the goings-on of the past few months, in which every inquiry into happenings at the state capital has been routed through the McCain campaign. And she has a serious abuse-of-power investigation hanging over her head.

After her speech at the Republican convention, it looked like we’d be hearing her name for decades to come. Instead, in three weeks, Sarah Palin may already be a footnote.

Hugh S. Bailey is assistant editorial page editor at the Connecticut Post. He can be reached at 203-330-6233 or via e-mail at hbailey@ctpost.com.