An interesting moment for Barack Obama. Everyone acknowledges he is leading. All the news stories in the past four days seem to indicate an overall national wave toward the Democratic Party may be taking place, with Republican Senate candidates struggling in places they shouldn’t be (like Georgia). And with four weeks to go until Election Day, the same present-ism that has affixed itself to this race at every point is at work. How can McCain possibly win? He needs a game-changer and he doesn’t have one! Americans are making up their minds right now!

Given my own tendency toward present-ism — last year at this time I thought Hillary couldn’t lose and that McCain couldn’t come back from his mid-2007 meltdown — I understand the frenetic quality of all this. But it is beside the point. There is no doubt that this election is what it has always been: Barack Obama’s to lose. But he can lose it. And perversely, he may be most in danger of losing it the way candidates always find themselves in danger of losing — from misplaced confidence and a sense of inevitability that accompanies the healthy ego of anyone vainglorious enough to believe he is deserving of 60-plus million votes and the management of the highest office in the land.

Obama has had a wonderful run these past three weeks by doing nothing. It is, in point of fact, what he does best, aside from speaking. As he did on hundreds of occasions in Illinois, he decided to vote present in the economic crisis — to make it clear he was around but not to get his hair mussed. McCain, by contrast, became so convinced he had to do something that he he either arguably did too much or too little with a bill that finally failed to pass the House at the beginning of last week.

Obama clearly had the better of that, just as he has the better of the economy. But the temptation to continue to vote present — to do as little as possible except electioneer from now until the voting stops — is where McCain may find his opening and his opportunity, in my view.

 The world’s financial and economic realities are not what they were three weeks ago. This affords McCain the chance of rebooting his campaign, to re-engineer his economic policy proposals in light of a prospective recession. I am only a political observer here, not an economist, so I don’t know what that rebooting would or could consist of. But a substantive gamble by McCain, one in which he attempts to change the tone and spirit of the last three weeks by introducing a new approach to a time of crisis, offers the possibility of a new focus to the presidential race — a focus that would allow McCain not merely to spend the next month trying to sow doubts about Obama but also to inspire the sense that McCain is looking forward and has something positive to contribute that will ameliorate the tough times ahead.

This is fraught with risks, to be sure. It would give Obama something to attack. But then, Obama will attack anyway. And it’s doubtful that he will want to risk anything when he thinks he can do better by skating through the next month.

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This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 6:18 PM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.