IT comes to something when the largest-ever US banking collapse, that of Washington Mutual last week, was hardly a major feature in the atmosphere of frantic financial crisis that is gripping America. In such extraordinary circumstances, it is hardly surprising that the presidential race is being pushed off the front pages. Indeed the only way that Obama and McCain made the news was by taking part in the ill-tempered bipartisan White House summit George W. Bush held in attempt to drive through his $800 billion bailout plan for the US financial system.
The two men did, however, move center-stage during their first televised debate Friday night. It began, as it had to, with the meltdown on Wall Street. Neither proposed specific fixes but McCain insisted that save for defense, all government spending would have to be cut back. Obama said that would be using a hammer when a scalpel was needed and used the already familiar mantra in both Republican and Democrat campaigns, that what now mattered was what was good for Main Street, not Wall Street.
And, of course, it is going to be the economy that will decide the election in less than five weeks’ time. Yet oddly, in this debate at least, it was foreign policy that may have had the greatest impact on voters. McCain made much of his wide international background and jibed at his rival that he would need no on-the-job experience — this ignoring the singular foreign affairs deficiencies of his running mate Sarah Palin. The Republican candidate also insisted that the Iraq invasion had been right and that Obama’s readiness to talk to America’s enemies such as Iran was ill conceived.
Now while America’s friends and allies are longing for an end to the blinkered bellicosity of the Bush years, Obama’s new foreign affairs approach is of little interest to Americans themselves. By slipping on Bush’s foreign policy clothes, McCain the statesman promised stability and continuity. And that presentation of himself as a wise old man on foreign policy is likely to chime with voters when they look for safe leadership through the domestic troubles that really concern them.
The danger for Obama is that his core agenda of change will start to look too dangerous for ordinary Americans. They want to go back to the good times only 12 months ago of easy credit and low prices. They are being panicked, not least by Bush who told them last week they were on the brink of economic disaster. Frantic voters think of their pocket books, not their principles. The only change they currently want is for the rot to stop. Despite “Gramps” McCain being already 72, he seems wise in years. And even if he dies in the White House, there is the homespun, no-nonsense Hockey Mom, Palin to take over. So what if she has hardly been abroad?
So as Obama contemplates the eclipse of his “change” campaign plank, he may wonder if having Hillary Clinton on the ticket might have been a better idea.
