BY JONATHAN EMONT

In print | September 25, 2008

When it comes to how external events affect the presidential race, pundits operate on two basic assumptions. The first is that when bad things happen outside the borders of the United States, McCain will rise in the polls. The second is that when bad things happen to the economy, Obama will get a boost. I can’t really argue with the first assumption; McCain has framed the debate so that anything good that happens outside the borders is proof that he’s been right all along, and anything bad that happens outside the borders is proof that we need a president of his experience to set things straight.

My issue is with the second assumption. While it follows that the collapse of unregulated banks would hurt the candidate, who, as recently as a month ago, was declaring himself “fundamentally a deregulator,” I’m not sure if, in this case, the simple logic will hold true.

Obama’s economic plan, with its emphasis on regulation, and its renunciation of the laissez-faire corporate approach that allowed this mortgage mess to metastasize, is certainly more feasible than whatever plan the McCain people have cooked up. It’s hard to see how voters couldn’t realize this. And certainly at least some of them do; Obama’s poll numbers seem to have stabilized after taking their post-Palin dip.

But McCain has overcome his early election stasis and is embarking on one of the most startling transformations of political candidate in American history. It was just a few months ago that McCain stood in front of autoworkers in Detroit, explaining that while many jobs might never come home, free trade benefits the nation as a whole. Now he’s busy warning Americans that powerful corporate interests control Washington.

To what extent this shift is genuine is difficult to tell. McCain has admitted that economics have never been his strong point, and as a result, his economic policies have lately mirrored the expedient. (When it was politic, he was the foremost Republican in bucking the conservative economic establishment, but he quickly scrapped this when he realized that he needed to appeal to at least one segment of the Republican base.)

And lately, it seems, McCain’s convinced himself that he’s an economic populist. There is a nascent movement within Republican ranks to shift the party further to the left on economic issues, in the hope of creating “Sam’s Club Republicans,” and allowing the party to merge populist rhetoric in the social sphere with populist rhetoric in the economic. McCain did pass over the champion of this movement, Tim Pawlenty, governor of Minnesota, as his vice-presidential nominee, but it appears that McCain has realized that the same folk who were so excited by Sarah Palin’s candidacy are not so excited about continued deregulation and corporate tax breaks.

Obama, on the other hand, hasn’t changed his attitude about anything. He remains remote and cerebral. He’s not channeling anybody’s rage; he’s proposing sensible policy prescriptions. It’s easy to blame him for this, especially if he doesn’t experience an immediate rise in the polls. But when it comes to populism, Obama has a fundamental image problem. It is no exaggeration to say that his chances in the election hinge on his ability to get over it.

Obama’s message has never resonated with the white working class. He’s too Harvard-educated and has begun to sound increasingly professorial on the campaign trail. His calls for hope and change are more effective when times aren’t as hard as they are now. And he’s black, which only serves to complicate things.

The financial crisis is a wake-up call. Republican refusal to regulate the banks led directly to Wall Street’s collapse. The message the country should take from this is simple: we need to elect Barack Obama president. We don’t need the momentous change he’s promising. We need competence.
My worry is not that this wake-up call will go unheeded, but that it will be misinterpreted. I am afraid that people will think Obama too inexperienced to dig America out of its latest mess. McCain is a known quantity, and in moments of crisis, people tend to go with what they know.

These aren’t the times when it’s good to be the new guy with the funny name. This isn’t to say that the financial meltdown won’t, in the end, help Obama. But some pundits have been crowing that the awful state of the economy ensures an Obama victory in November. I think their analysis is very premature.

Jonathan is a first-year. He can be reached at jemont1@swarthmore.edu.

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