Herbert Hoover Redux?

Palin didn’t do anywhere as near as badly Friday night as the Republicans feared she might and the Democrats hoped she would. Her comeback skills exceeded what one might have expected from merely good handling. She showed she has some brains and grit of her own.
Does that help her ticket? Not a lot. John McCain is in the kind of trouble that no one speech, no one debate, no one gaffe can overcome. The focus of the campaign has changed. As long as the primary issue was Iraq and who makes a better Commander in Chief, it was neck and neck.
Very few – if any – parties in power have lost an election because of a war going on. Look at the election of 1864. The war was going on forever. Casualty lists were huge. No end was in sight. The opposition was appealing to a strong peace movement. But Lincoln won, despite all that.
Look at the election of 1944. “Don’t change horses in the middle of the stream” cried the Democrats – who were running Roosevelt for the fourth time! He was too sick to campaign, worn out and ready to die -- and he won anyway. He came as close to emulating El Cid (whose corpse was suited up in armor, mounted on his horse and sent into battle) as we want to think about.
You may point to 1968 – but there was a significant difference. Johnson had withdrawn from the race, and since we had to “switch horses” anyway, people picked an entirely new horse. Could LBJ have won if he’s stayed in? No one knows. He had more cunning than Hubert Humphrey – he might have been a match for Nixon.
But give Palin credit. She held her own against a man Barack OBama picked to be an attack dog. One can complain about things Palin said and didn’t say in the debate, but she did not come across as an idiot.
Biden wisely played the role of the restrained, hoary headed Senate veteran. His smile seemed genuine, and when he invoked Mike Mansfield (a hero of mine), he almost made me want to vote for him. He may actually have won on issues, but the edge for presence and style goes to the lady from Alaska.
But the issues had changed. She wasn’t in the same game she might have been in two weeks before. In football they call it “momentum”. In a game you can see it change. In 1960 when I had a job at the Photo Morgue of the now defunct New York World Telegram and Sun, I watched it change.
I handled hundreds of photos a day. Most were of the campaign. Sometime in October, I could see from looking at the pictures that things were swinging to Kennedy. (How, I cannot say, but you can see it.) Momentum changed – right there in the photographs.
This year’s issue became the economy about two weeks ago. Big time. When the DOW drops 750 points in a day, major banks collapse, people can’t get credit for cars and houses, this gets the voters attention.
It’s always the total fault of the man in the Oval Office. No such thing as an Act of God when my IRA drops precipitously. “He” did it!!! That kind of economic catastrophe tends to paint the incumbent party into a nasty corner.
You could say to John McCain, “Welcome to Herbert Hoover country” – or to George W.H. Bush country, or to Benjamin Harrison (1892) country. Or to Martin Van Buren country (1840).
It’s just not a good place for a political party – or its candidate—to be. There doesn’t seem to be any good way out of that box. That may be fair – presidents take credit when the DOW goes up; I guess they deserve the hit when it goes down. But when it does go down, there’s no place to hide.
No matter how good Palin might have been Friday night – and even if Biden had been dreadful – it probably wouldn’t have made much difference in the polls. The leading political indicators in this country remain the paycheck and the portfolio.
Palin was funny when she chided Biden, “There you go again, looking back … .” But that’s exactly where a voter who fears for his wallet looks. Right back at the political party on whose watch things got so dicey. It’s too late for her to become a Democrat now.