Ok I finally figured out why the McCain campaign has failed so badly. They have pandered to the lowest common denominator of America: Fear. Without realizing that Americans are no longer afraid of what they think they are afraid of.
2002 and 2004 proved that fear works, as if they didn’t know it already. The story of the McCain campaign has been one of casting about to find the right fear to exploit. They haven’t been able to find it. They haven’t been able to find it because they don’t realize that the fears of their base are no longer the fears of the majority of Americans. If they ever were.
They mistakenly thought that social fear, the fear of immigrants, the fear of gays, the fear of minorities, the fear of other was what won them those elections. They forgot 2006, when after NOT being attacked by terrorists. They forgot or ignored that the societal fear that fuels their base is NOT shared by most Americans. That the reason Americans joined their base was out of fear of attack from without, not attack from within. Without another terrorist attack in the intervening years, (no thanks to them btw, the fear had always been vastly overinflated) America is rejecting the fears of their base, the fears of the lowest common denominator. They have seen through the politics of hate, at least to the extent where it does not dominate their list of fears. The base is still there, the rest of America though, is not joining them this time. They have their solid 25% of Americans who fear and hate other Americans for their skin color or sexual orientation. But they have lost the rest of America.
Heck, it is even possible that after eight years Americans are just plain tired of living in fear!
(Unless the fear of Socialism, a Socialism that the Republicans (despite their bleating) are forcing on America, works.)
The fears of the Republican base (apparently) are not the fears of most of America. They won in the past because they were able to combine the fears of their base with the fear of the rest of the electorate. But those fears have shifted, and the Republicans have not kept up.
Americas fear shifted to, except for their base, a fear of them. A fear that they were spending Americans tax money on a failed and unnecessary war. A fear, perhaps not fully realized, that they were out of control with their Big Brother big government. The very demonstrable fear that America was on the wrong track, due to their vision of America, due to their misreading of Americas fears.
Then along comes a politician that offers them something other than fear. And it is working.
Even though he himself, in the color of his skin, literally embodies the fears of the Republican base.
As we see from the deplorable rhetoric of the Palins and Bachmanns, there are a percentage of Americans who do not believe in America as anything but a refuge for their version of Real Americans. Who believe that if you do not look and think like them, you are not American at all, but are part of the invasion of their country.
That view is about to be roundly rejected by the rest of America. Not because the rest of America objects specifically to that view, but because that view is inherently stupid. Stupid and small minded. Fear makes you stupid, because it is stupid to ignore reality. And their fears are NOT the current reality. To hold that view, you must…at least to some extent… be stupid and small minded.
To cut to the bone of this reality, all we need to do is look to the past eight years and see the one unmistakable fact. Stupid, small minded people are incapable of running a huge and complex government that is now inextricably linked to the rest of the world.
Game over.
For now. The politics of fear have always been with us, and until humans evolve into creatures less ruled by fear and more ruled by reason, they will be.
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McCain is gaining in all the polls. There are problems with this election. It’s less predictable than you think….
them being idiots might have something to do with it. 🙂
…first of all, I think that the McCain campaign’s main theme was not fear but the “great man” theory and the divine right of the nobility. McCain’s entire campaign has been based on how “special” a human being John McCain supposedly is. Consider the way that McCain spoke in the debates. It isn’t that his plans for capturing bin Laden or saving Social Security are best; instead, it is “I know how to get bin Laden” and “I know how to fix Social Security (it’s easy)!” The entire McCain campaign has boiled down to nothing more than John McCain is super great.
On the other hand, fear is significantly dominating this election – fear of the economy and its future – and Obama is achieving his dominance in the late period particularly due to that fear. Obama’s remarkable calm and reassurance taps into the FDR fireside chat phenomenon; he reassures people that things will be okay. By and large, most Americans aren’t scared of the Republican base. What they are, more than anything else, is mistrustful. They disbelieve nearly everything they hear (with good reason). And Obama simply comes off as promising less, and is winning on temperment. Americans may fear black people in general, but they have had a long period where they learned that there are some black people who aren’t scary. They may fear terrorists, but they have bigger problems now, which are far more likely to actually affect them.
Consider the proliferation of “We’re voting for the n*****r” stories that have come out lately. People are still voting scared. Just scared of something other than what the Republicans want them to be.
… you hit the nail on the head here:
When you’re close to losing your home, your job, your retirement savings, and McCain says he isn’t going to talk about the economy, I think that strikes more fear than calling Obama a terrist.
…you are right, that the “socialist” thing is most likely to carry, at this point. It strikes to the heart of the right-wing to middle-of-the-road conservative. I was just scared to death when I heard him say “spread the wealth” and knew it would be used against us in a big way.
On the other hand, it’s an innoculation to the idea of a commonweal, which we’ve been told is anethema since Reagan (hell, even Nixon wanted a negative income tax). If it’s out there…and Obama wins anyway…it will I think feed the perception that maybe…a little bit of “socialism”…if we call it something else, is OK.
was the year my family came back from a one year assignment in Germany. Upon trying to register my second daughter for Catholic CCD classes my wife asked if my daughter could be in the same class with one of her friends. The woman in charge ripped the check out of my wife’s hand and said no, “we have to follow the rules here and can’t accomodate special requests”. That was one of our first reverse cross-cultural experiences upon our return to our former Homeland. It did in fact turn out to be a blessing in disguise as it led our family to ignore the traditions of Catholic education for my son. My son would have been in that perfect age and timeline for the breaking of the Catholic pedophile priest scandal. I was told a local police officer had to be restrained from taking action when he found out his son was “involved”.
Our suburban family has been operating in survivalist mode ever since but it’s both left and right factions that cause us alarm.
I guess America has finally graduated from High School. I remember sitting down at the Oak Street Beach in Chicago late one night when i was a teenager discussing politics with a homeless woman. She was of the opinion that America was locked in perpetual adolescence. This was in 1977. How prescient she was.
Unfortunately, she wanted a place to sleep and I didn’t have one to offer. I was crashing at friends’ homes or sleeping on the beach myself.