Perhaps it\u2019s my imagination, but as we enter the last 48 hours of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama\u2019s rhetoric on the stump is sounding increasingly defensive. That is a bad sign for his prospects.\u00a0 Here\u2019s why.<\/p>\n
I wrote speeches \u2013 in three cases many, many speeches — for Republican candidates or key surrogates (for example, President Reagan in 1988) in every presidential race from 1984 through 2000.\u00a0 In that time, I learned a thing or two about campaign gamesmanship.<\/p>\n
Key is that from the conventions through mid-October, you are not fighting over votes to be cast so much as over whose agenda will dominate the last two and a half weeks before the voting.\u00a0 If, as I do, you believe that most poll movement from mid-September to mid-October this year was statistical noise \u2013 with each candidate\u2019s numbers moving up and down within the margin of error \u2013 this year\u2019s race looks like most others. The bulk of the electorate effectively decided which nominee they would support months ago.<\/p>\n
These voters surely do favor Senator Obama but judging from the best of the polls, not by much. The highly regarded IBD\/TIPP tracking survey released Sunday showed a spread between the candidates of only 2.1 percent.\u00a0 It also showed 8.7 percent undecided.\u00a0 The last three months have been about controlling the terms of debate during the period that this 8.7 percent would make up its mind.<\/p>\n
Here is the rule: whichever candidate sets the terms of discussion in the closing days of an election will emerge as the winner.\u00a0 This year \u2013 thanks to several inexplicable late-game gaffes \u2013 Barack Obama has found himself responding to John McCain throughout this final weekend.<\/p>\n
Gaffe #1: \u201cSpread the wealth\u201d:\u00a0 Made on a rope line in response to a question from the now-iconic Joe the Plumber, Obama\u2019s comment went entirely unnoticed until a video clip of that exchange \u2013 apparently made with a cell phone — popped up on YouTube.\u00a0 Until then, Senator McCain had been struggling to define the difference on economic policy between him and Mr. Obama.\u00a0 He brilliantly seized on the remark and Joe the Plumber as his emblem of the American people and their aspirations during the final debate.\u00a0 Suddenly Obama was the one who didn\u2019t get it about the middle class.\u00a0 The Illinois senator fumbled with Senator McCain\u2019s debate attacks and then made a second unforced error at a rally a day or two later.<\/p>\n
Gaffe #2: \u201cSelfishness\u201d:\u00a0 I know that it is current campaign orthodoxy that every charge must be rebutted, but the candidate doesn\u2019t always have to be the one who rebuts.\u00a0 This is a lesson apparently lost on Mr. Obama and his operatives.\u00a0 Despite MSM instant surveys that named the Democratic candidate the winner of that final debate, Team Obama and in particular the candidate himself must have understood that they had taken it seriously on the chin that Wednesday night.\u00a0 So they decided to respond, having Obama tell a rally that McCain was making \u201cselfishness\u201d the center of his campaign.<\/p>\n
Most Americans do not believe that paying higher taxes is a sign of \u201cpatriotism\u201d, as Joe Biden had put it, or that resisting higher taxes is a sign of \u201cselfishness.\u201d Neither did it help that Obama used another rally to mock Joe the Plumber (\u201cHow many plumbers do you know who make $250,000 a year?\u201d).\u00a0 Sunday\u2019s IBD\/TIPP poll showed for the first time McCain winning those whose education stopped at high school, as, one presumes, Joe\u2019s did.<\/p>\n
And then, fumbling even more, Obama, Biden and their surrogates started moving the threshold of taxation down from $250,000 income a year to $200,000, to $150,000, to $75,000.\u00a0 Perhaps they wanted to establish that they had a mandate to tax more broadly than Obama had originally suggested, but whatever the reason, it soon looked as though they wanted \u2013 as McCain was charging — a green light to take everybody\u2019s wealth and spread it around.\u00a0 In other words, they were caught in the web of Senator McCain\u2019s themes on the defining economic issues of the contest.\u00a0 Their every answer was confirming his redistributionist and socialist charges. Even worse for them, they were answering McCain\u2019s themes, not making him answer theirs.\u00a0 They were playing on his court, not on their own.<\/p>\n
Gaffe #3: \u201cHe\u2019ll be tested\u201d:\u00a0 This was Joe Biden\u2019s gaffe, of course.\u00a0 If he loses, Senator Obama can thank cell phones and private tape recorders, which caught not just this amazing riff and Obama\u2019s \u201cspread the wealth\u201d one but also Obama\u2019s \u201ccling to their religion and their guns\u201d remark to wealthy donors in San Francisco about the same Western Pennsylvanians Congressmen John Murtha even more unbelievably and entirely publicly characterized as \u201cracists\u201d and \u201crednecks.\u201d\u00a0 Everyone talks about the Democratic ticket\u2019s innovative messaging.\u00a0 And this much is true \u2013 repeated insults directed at a group of voters who may well decide whether you win or lose everything does set a new standard in American political rhetoric.<\/p>\n
But Biden\u2019s talk about a \u201cmanufactured\u201d international crisis to test a President Obama reminded voters at exactly the most pivotal time that Mr. Obama has not gone through a test in his life more strenuous than the LSATs.\u00a0 So, suddenly, once more, the Obama campaign found itself responding, this time playing on turf where thematically it can never win.<\/p>\n
If the smart money is predicting an Obama victory, put me in the dumb money.\u00a0 Something is happening in this campaign.\u00a0 The candidate everyone says is winning acts as if he\u2019s on the ropes.\u00a0 The one everybody says to be down is scoring the blows.\u00a0 Whatever the MSM would like to believe, this fight isn\u2019t over yet.<\/p>\n
Clark S. Judge is managing director of the White House Writers Group in Washington.\u00a0 He was a special assistant and speechwriter to President Reagan.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Perhaps it\u2019s my imagination, but as we enter the last 48 hours of the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama\u2019s rhetoric on the stump is sounding increasingly defensive. That is a bad sign for his prospects.\u00a0 Here\u2019s why. I wrote speeches \u2013 in three cases many, many speeches — for Republican candidates or key surrogates (for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[36],"tags":[12],"class_list":["post-33","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-political-commentary-campaign-2008","tag-hugh-hewitt"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":572,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions\/572"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clarkjudge.org\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}