Oct 14th, 2008. Filed under Nestor Mata.
An unedifying race
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By Nestor Mata
Sarah Palin, the new political star who appeared on the national stage over two weeks ago has grabbed the spotlight away from Barack Obama, the Democratic Party’s first black presidential candidate in the historic race to the White House.
Yes, as one perceptive and longtime political observer of American presidential politics noted, the excitement that Obama created at the beginning of the campaign has vanished, and he has lost control of this campaign. And his Republican rival John McCain, with Palin’s help at celebrity rallies, has surged ahead of him (Obama) in the race.
The latest reports clearly show that Obama’s campaign is slumping, poll numbers are going down, and his Democratic allies are frantically hurling aggressive attacks against the McCain-Palin team. Naturally,
with the Republicans retaliating, the race is turning into a vicious exchange of personal attacks, insults, smears and gutter-style tactics, something familiar to us Filipinos.
Indeed, Obama, who hopes to be the 44th US president, appears to have been outshone by the show-stealing Palin. Her considerable appeal to American voters, especially women with children like her, has boosted McCain’s chances over Obama.
That’s why Obama?s camp is now scrambling to contain an insurgent McCain-Palin ticket. With just less than two months away from E-Day, they probably realized that he can?’ win on the basis alone of his life story and supposed personal values, which are but trivial melodies that will immediately go out of fashion.
They’re now mocking McCain’s war veteran’s disability, saying that his severe war injuries prevent him from combing his hair, tying his shoes, and typing the keyboard of a computer, to score cheap points for Obama.
Not only that, they’re discrediting the claim of McCain and Palin as the “real candidates for change,” in the hope that they could seize back the mantle of change of Obama.
Of course, the McCain camp is returning the personal attacks, saying that Obama must be “losing his mind very fast” and “putting his elitist foot in his mouth” and that he’s suffering from “Palin Derangement Syndrome” combined with a bad case of “Celebrity Envy,” and making them
(the Democrats) do stupid things.
The more sober Obama advisers are telling him not to personally respond to the tough attacks of the Republicans, and just let his political surrogates do the attacking, and stop running against Palin and start running against McCain. Unfortunately the arrogant Obama isn’t doing it!
Thus, as perceptive commentators observed, “the Democrats are now a gloomy lot, inclined to see catastrophe around every corner and the Republicans as tougher, meaner and more manipulative.” And, as one pundit bluntly put it, they are “imbibing this potion of false pride about Democratic
values mixed with paranoia about the Republicans? dark genius only leads to defeat followed by glorious disillusionment.”
Still another observer said that Obama “erred by putting too much focus on himself and his transformational brand of politics which was too airy and put him at risk of being branded a hypocrite. He needs to play rough, too!”
As a journalist who has been watching American presidential elections for decades, I wondered why Obama has not sought the advice of Bill Clinton, the 42nd US president, who has been the only Democrat since Franklin Delano Roosevelt to win two terms.
Bill Clinton, the political Houdini, could give lessons to Barack Obama, the politically inexperienced candidate, on how to win the US presidency!
(Just after writing this piece, I read a news report that Obama did have a two-hour lunch chat with Clinton at the latter’s Harlem office in New York. But it was not clear whether the Democratic candidate, who has kept a cool distance from the former president after he won the nomination from Hillary Clinton, wanted Bill Clinton’s advice. Their meeting was closed.)
