On Board the “Straight-Talk Express”
By: Brandon Sherman
With just under a month to go before the election, the Straight Talk Express rolled through Bethlehem, PA on October 8th, making a campaign stop for a rally at Stabler Arena.
Senator John McCain, along with wife Cindy and Governor Sarah Palin, energized a sellout crowd of 6,000 GOP partisans from the Lehigh Valley. Surrounded by prominent local and state-level Republicans, McCain and Palin gave their standard stump speeches. Palin emphasized the need for energy independence, leading the crowd in a raucous chorus of “Drill Baby Drill!” McCain hit the Democratic ticket hard on the economy, reiterating his pledge to keep taxes low and cut wasteful spending. The pair also took some sharp jabs at Obama’s inexperience and dubious political affiliations, juxtaposed with reminders of McCain’s 22 years of military service and reputation as the Maverick of the Senate.
Outside the arena, McCain-Palin supporters were enthusiastically parroting these talking points, while adding some colorful extrapolations of their own. The required YouTube viewing, “Sidewalk to Nowhere,” documents repeated confrontations between McCain supporters and some pro-Obama Lehigh student protesters. McCain’s loyalists have internalized the campaign’s new Ayers/Wright/ACORN message and many of them appear to be very, very mad. The Washington Post’s headline about the rally read “Rage in the Town of Bethlehem.”
Indeed, on Goodman Campus, the McCain-Palin ticket was running on all cylinders: Obama’s economic philosophy is redistributive and socialist! He can’t protect us from terrorists because he pals around with them!! John McCain will follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell and kill him with his bare hands!!! Alas, the old adage about the “Lehigh Bubble” reminds us that the South Mountain has only a casual relationship with reality. The unabated excitement in and around Stabler Arena stood in stark contrast to increasingly bad news for the GOP’s November hopes.
Hindsight may prove that this campaign stop caught the McCain-Palin ticket at the precipice of its decline. Lackluster polling from the previous evening’s town-hall debate left the Republican ticket with a hangover from spinning well into the night. National and swing state polls have proven this economic climate to be toxic for any candidate with an (R) next to his or her name. The Palin VP pick has begun to wear down the Conservative intelligentsia and voters alike; prominent Conservative columnist David Brooks claimed that Palin is a “fatal cancer” to the Republican Party. Peggy Noonan of the Wall Street Journal and Kathleen Parker of the National Review are fellow defectors. On October 21st, an NBC/WSJ poll showed that 55% of voters say Palin is “not qualified” to be Vice President, and that she represents voters’ largest concern about the McCain candidacy.
Meanwhile, the Campaign itself has more leaks than the Titanic. They gave the Obama campaign an early Christmas present by flatly stating: “If we keep talking about the economy, we’re going to lose.” McCain marched forward with a decisive shift in messaging towards character issues, in short: “Who is Barack Obama?” The only problem: most indicators suggest that these attacks are only fueling rage in the Hannity and Limbaugh corners of the GOP, not attracting the independent voters that McCain will need to be successful on November 4th. The same NBC/WSJ poll found that only 16% of voters are concerned by Obama’s connections to controversial pastor Jeremiah Wright and Weather Underground founder William Ayers. That number can’t include too many people who weren’t going to vote Republican anyway. Gen. Colin Powell’s Meet the Press appearance punctuated those numbers. Powell, a four-star general and veteran of several Republican administrations, endorsed Obama, delivering an explicit and comprehensive indictment of the GOP ticket and its campaign tactics.
With two weeks until game-time, McCain and Palin are playing defense and frantically shifting resources, while Obama and Biden are comfortable enough to expand their operations in traditionally red states like West Virginia and North Carolina. With so many swing states slipping from McCain’s grasp, his strategy will probably focus on Pennsylvania.
If he can win Pennsylvania’s twenty-one electoral votes, while holding onto Ohio and Florida, he can afford to lose Virginia, New Mexico and Colorado. This is easier said than done (the Morning Call has Obama +11 in PA as of Oct. 22), but it may be his only hope. The campaign should send Palin to Western PA, the region that Congressman Jack Murtha just described as “racist” and “redneck.” She’ll need to make these voters so scared of Obama that rather than head home after the rally, they start camping out in front of polling places. Meanwhile, McCain should focus on the swing regions of the Lehigh Valley and suburban Philadelphia, where Palin may be too polarizing. He should use the word “Maverick” a lot, and he should hope for a miracle.
