McCain-Jindal ?
Posted on Sunday, May 11, 2008
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/bcdr/Editorial/61693/
Barack Obama said recently, “ We’ve had a rough couple of weeks. ” Actually, he’s had a rough couple of months. He’s lost three big primaries to Hillary Clinton. And, should he hold on to win the nomination, he can no longer be considered a clear favorite over John Mc-Cain in the general election
In a New York Times / CBS News poll in late February, Obama was defeating John Mc-Cain 50 to 38. Two months later, the Times / CBS poll had McCain and Obama tied. The poll that came out last Sunday showed Obama reopening a lead over McCain — but clearly over this period a vulnerability for Obama was exposed.
While Obama’s 12-point lead over McCain was evaporating, Hillary Clinton moved from a tie in February to a 5-point advantage, and now that has widened further.
The main reason for Clinton’s strong performance was surely that she didn’t have as her pastor for 20 years the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Obama has now repudiated Wright because of Wright’s recent remarks at the National Press Club. But Wright said nothing new there. AIDS could well have been invented by the U. S. government. Sept. 11 was at least in part “ chickens coming home to roost. ” Louis Farrakhan deserves our respect. These views of Wright were known to Obama when he made his “ I can no more disown him” speech in Philadelphia on March 18. Yet, last week, at a press conference in North Carolina, Obama claimed to be “ shocked” and “ surprised” by what Wright had said, and disowned him.
What really seems to have shocked and surprised Obama is what Wright said about him: “ What I think particularly angered me was his suggestion somehow that my previous denunciation of his remarks were somehow political posturing. ” Later on in his press conference, Obama returned to this, saying that Wright’s cavalier dismissal of Obama as just another politician was “ a show of disrespect to me. ”
Some voters might think it would have been nice if Obama had been as angry in March at Wright’s disrespect to the United States of America as he was in April at Wright’s disrespect to Barack Obama.
Still, Obama is the likely Democratic nominee. Some conservatives are giddy at the thought — kidding themselves that the general election will therefore be easy, that Obama will be another Dukakis. I was struck, though, in several conversations this week with Mc-Cain campaign staffers and advisers that they’re pretty sober about the task ahead. About the Dukakis analogy, for example, one McCain aide said: If in 1988 Ronald Reagan had had a 30 percent job approval rating, and 80 percent of the voters had thought we were on the wrong track, Dukakis would have won.
And the McCain campaign knows the environment for Republicans remains toxic. They noticed that last weekend, Republicans lost their second House seat in a special election in two months — this one in a district they had held since 1974 and that Bush had carried by almost 20 points in 2004.
Another McCain staffer called my attention to this finding in the latest Fox News poll: Mc-Cain led Obama in the straight matchup, 46 to 43. Voters were then asked to choose between two tickets, McCain-Romney vs. Obama-Clinton. Obama-Clinton won 47 to 41.
That reversal of a 3-point Mc-Cain lead to a 6-point deficit for the McCain ticket suggests what might happen, a ) when the Democrats unite, and b ) if Mc-Cain were to choose a conventional running mate, who, as it were, reinforced the Republican brand for the ticket. As the Mc-Cain aide put it, this is what will happen if we run a traditional campaign; our numbers will gradually regress toward the (losing ) generic Republican number.
Maybe that’s why, in separate conversations last week, no fewer than four McCain staffers and advisers mentioned as a possible vice-presidential pick the 36-year-old Louisiana governor, Bobby Jindal. They’re tempted by the idea of picking someone so young, with real accomplishments and with a strong reformist streak. It might also be a way to confront the issue of McCain’s age (71 ), which private polls and focus groups suggest could be a real problem. A Jindal pick would implicitly acknowledge the questions and raise the ante. The message would be: “ You want generational change ? You can get it with Mc-Cain-Jindal — without risking a liberal and inexperienced Obama as commander in chief. ” I would add that it was after McCain spent considerable time with Jindal in New Orleans a week and a half ago, and reportedly found him, as he has before, personally engaging and intellectually impressive, that the campaign’s informal name-dropping of Jindal began.
• • • William Kristol writes for The New York Times.