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McCain gains home ground
Viewpoint
Monday July 28th 2008
With Barack Obama away on a highly publicised foreign tour of the Middle East and Europe, John McCain took the opportunity to touch base with the working people of the Mid-West, to rave reviews. This is the first of a series of Viewpoint articles by Guardian world affairs commentator Simon Tisdall
Monday July 28th 2008
Not just the safer choice: presidential hopeful Senator John McCain. Photograph: Brett Flashnick/AP
The city of Columbus, in the state of Ohio, is one of those down-to-earth places where US presidential elections get decided. Part of America's rusting industrial heartland, it is here that the credit crunch, mortgage crisis and rising prices cause real pain. If, as George Bush put it last week, Wall Street gets drunk, it is in cities such as Columbus that they feel the hangover.
Columbus is also the place where Republican presidential candidate John McCain was spending time last week. While Barack Obama, his Democratic rival, was swanning around Europe, McCain held town meetings, talked about the rocketing cost of petrol, and generally tried to contrast his straight-talking, pragmatic approach to day-to-day problems with that of his vision-conjuring, dream-spinning, photo-opping opponent.
The tactic appears to have paid off. The Columbus Dispatch newspaper led its front page with McCain's visit, giving second place to Obama in Berlin. State television and radio followed suit in Ohio and Pennsylvania, another "battleground state" visited by McCain in Obama's absence.
Laura Spatzer, a saleswoman in Bloomsburg, Pa., seemed to speak for many voters when she told a news agency reporter: "I don't think they feel the effects of the (Obama) trip here. People are looking at gas prices." Another resident said that she did not really know why Obama was in Europe instead of at home addressing the issues that concerned ordinary people. "He's not president yet."
Tracking polls underscore that last remark. Although Obama is leading, the race is tightening up amid signs that the Democratic candidate may be "peaking" too soon. Given Obama's rock star image, many voters accept, by a margin of 44% to 30% according to an NBC/Wall Street Journal survey, that he is best placed to improve a US image overseas damaged by eight years of George Bush.
But in the same poll, McCain is seen as better equipped to be president by a striking 53% to 19%. This finding, pointing primarily but not wholly to concerns about Obama's relative inexperience, is reflected in other polls, too.
Obama's foreign tour, designed to demonstrate that he could lead America in the world, is likely to have much more impact abroad than at home. In fact, his highly publicised swing through the Middle East and Europe may even have a negative effect, in that it emphasised the showy, demagogic and often substance-free aspect of his candidacy while disappointing those who hope for a new approach.
Obama gives a good speech and looks good doing it. But as McCain's people point out, his key policies as stated last week – unstinting support for Israel, more troops for Afghanistan, a conditional withdrawal from Iraq – hardly represent an agenda for change. McCain is already committed to all of that – and is meanwhile assiduously working bread-and-butter issues with the blue-collar vote in the Mid-West.
While Obama was playing JFK reincarnated in Berlin, McCain was eating in a German family restaurant in Ohio. For many, Obama's performances smacked of presumption and staginess. On the other hand, McCain's decision to be photographed in a golf buggy at Kennebunkport, Maine, with George Bush Snr was a risibly bad move. The combined age of the two men was over 150 years. It looked like an old folks' outing.
These are straws in the wind for the decisive two months from Labor Day in September that will decide the contest.
Obama is going to have to work hard to show he has workable plans that will connect with and help overcome the tough challenges facing working people. So far there has been too much talk of mould-breaking and too little of problem-solving.
For his part, McCain is going to have to show that he is a worthy, consequential figure in his own right, and not merely a safer choice than the Democrat. So far (partly due to the media hype around Obama) he has too often appeared to be trailing in his rival's wake. Sometimes this campaign has appeared not like a race between two candidates but a referendum on one of them, with McCain haplessly looking on.
But that will change in the autumn when the two come to grips face-to-face, not least in the televised debates. At that point, as ever, the man most in touch with the concerns of people in places such as Columbus will have the edge.
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