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Opinion -
Guest Columns
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G. Terry Madonna & Michael L. Young
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Saturday, 12 July 2008 17:00 |
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McCain is cleaning up more than 3 to 1 among voters who think the country is headed in the right direction, he’s ahead 20 points among voters whose personal finances are better off compared to last year, he’s clobbering Obama 4 to 1 among voters who think family values are the top issue of the campaign, he’s hammering him by 25 points among voters who say foreign policy is the biggest issue, he’s beating him 5 to 1 among voters who list illegal immigration as the top issue, and he’s winning by more than 20 points among voters who rank taxes as the most important issue.
Good news for McCain? Maybe not! Winning only matters if what you’re winning matters too. And in McCain’s case, it largely doesn’t. In fact as the Franklin & Marshall College Poll also reveals, despite losing on a wide range of usually salient issues, Barack Obama leads John McCain nationally by six percentage points.
McCain is winning the issue battles but losing the electoral war, because the issues he is winning are not the issues most voters care about. Family values, immigration, foreign policy, country on the right track, and better off finances — count McCain a winner. But on the issues voters say are most important to their vote choice this year — the economy, Iraq, and health care — McCain is a big loser.
Math, not politics, matters here. For example, McCain is winning among voters who say the country is moving in the right direction, but such voters make up a paltry 17% of all voters. Similarly, McCain is winning overwhelmingly among voters who say their own finances are better off this year than last, but that’s only 15% of all voters.
The results on the issues are similar: foreign policy is a big strength for McCain, but only about five percent of voters rank it most important. Illegal immigration, another strong McCain issue, similarly draws just five percent of voters. Taxes, a perennial GOP winner, is also a winner for McCain, but a scant three percent of voters say it matters most to them.
In sharp contrast, the issues McCain is losing, he is losing big: the economy (20 points), Iraq (24 points), and health care (45 points). Worse for him, these three are the critical issues of the campaign — two of every three voters list one of them as the most important issue this year. And McCain is losing all three of them to Obama.
In the political algebra of 2008 presidential politics, McCain is winning where it matters least while losing where it matters most.
All of this is clear enough in the data. But why is it happening? The clear answer seems to be that the economy has become the dominant issue of the campaign. Not Iraq or immigration or some other issue as once seemed possible, but economic policy increasingly is defining the contours of the race.
Not that it is unusual for the economy to emerge as a major issue in presidential contests. Indeed, it would be unusual for it not to be an issue. This year and this contest; however, seem different. The breadth of anguish expressed by the average voter about the troubled economy is striking. In the recent Franklin & Marshall Poll, almost half of all respondents (42%) say their personal finances are worse this year than last.
Consistent with these individual economic concerns, voters’ worries this year are neither abstract nor ambiguous — not angst about macro issues like inflation or even unemployment — but rather intense personal concern about how they and their families can cope on a daily basis with the economic pressures upon them.
Thus emerging into the race are the "kitchen table issues," best defined as the sort of everyday concerns that confront ordinary folks on a daily basis. Traditional economic issues tend to the abstract: inflation rates, unemployment numbers, GDP growth, and the fluctuations of the stock market. But kitchen table issues comprise the concrete: bill paying, food purchases, tuition bills, vacation plans, and family heath care coverage.
And it is to these kitchen table issues that the 2008 election is increasingly turning. Just how powerfully the ongoing economic turmoil has walloped family resources can be seen in some very personal information reported in the Franklin & Marshall College Poll. When asked about economic hardships in the last twelve months, one in four voters said they lacked health insurance, one in five had their pay cut, one in five couldn't afford to pay for medical treatment or afford to buy gas, and one in six couldn't afford to buy food. Overall more than half (52%) of respondents reported experiencing at least one significant financial hardship at some point during the past year.
How might this all play out in November? Few forecasters now expect an early end to the current economic turmoil. Any turnaround might take a year or longer. So kitchen table issues are likely to remain the driving issues in the campaign.
So far they are boosting Obama. Earlier challengers have similarly benefited from them. In the 1980 election, Ronald Reagan used bad economic times to dampen the fears some voters had about him and his policies on Social Security and the Cold War. In 1992 voters came to believe that George H. W. Bush simply did not understand or appreciate the depths of their apprehension over the economy. Bill Clinton used this fear to overcome questions about his character.
So Obama, in the tradition of Reagan and Clinton before him, now stands most to benefit from the shift to kitchen table issues. Voters seem prepared to suppress any doubts about Obama as they did about Reagan and Clinton in order to get the change they want.
Nevertheless, McCain cannot be counted out. This is still a close race. After six months of intensive campaigning, some 15% of voters are still undecided. And voters know what they want — they want their economic problems addressed — they want the kitchen table issues put back on the table. More than anything else, Obama leads now precisely because he has done a better job of positioning himself as the candidate who can do just that.
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Last Updated on Friday, 11 July 2008 15:02 |
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Opinion -
Guest Columns
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Raymond C. Scheppach
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Tuesday, 08 July 2008 17:00 |
Washington, DC, USA. The next president faces a crucial choice in how he’ll get along – not just with foreign governments — but with leaders at home in the 50 states. Stop coercing and start cooperating is the advice from Raymond C. Scheppach, executive director of the National Governors Association (NGA), in his latest commentary.
Here’s a crucial question for the presumed presidential nominees — Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama — and all the candidates for the next Congress. Are you happy with the status quo in federal-state relations?
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Last Updated on Saturday, 13 June 2009 11:01 |
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Opinion -
Guest Columns
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Malcolm King
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Thursday, 03 July 2008 17:00 |
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Melbourne, Victoria, AUS. Anyone who has been a leader, who has tried to make large workplace changes, who doesn’t speak English, who has a mental illness or is a teenage girl, knows the power of ostracism.
The social webs of friends, of clubs, community and in the workplace are becoming stretched for a variety of complex reasons.
One of the perverse by-products of living in a post industrial society is the frequent use of ostracism, especially among the middle class, as a form of punishment.
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Last Updated on Sunday, 08 February 2009 20:22 |
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Opinion -
Guest Columns
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G. Terry Madonna & Michael L. Young
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Saturday, 28 June 2008 17:00 |
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Lancaster, PA, USA. Independence Day is our leading national holiday. It has no equal or rival in its prominence and popularity. But maybe it should.
To be sure, the Fourth of July commemorates a crucial moment in national history; that decisive point in time in which the Second Continental Congress declared, formally and publicly, American independence from Great Britain. That day together with the written Declaration of Independence itself comprise the single most familiar day and single most famed document in American history.
But the very importance attributed to Independence Day and to the Declaration of Independence begs one of the most intriguing questions in national political life: Why then is it that we pay so little attention to another epochal event and seminal document in national history, separated in time by little more than a dozen years and equally vital, if not more so, to our national destiny?
We speak of course of the U.S. Constitution. Why do we pay so little attention to the commemoration of it while paying so much to the Declaration?
It is true that the Constitution has not been utterly ignored. In fact, there is now a federal holiday on September 17th that was mandated by Congress in 2004. The date, supplanting a largely unknown holiday called Citizenship Day, is distinctly low key. So far it is lightly observed — mainly in public schools and then only because Congress provides educational resources pertaining to the Constitution on that day. Few Americans seem aware of the day, and there are no public closures for it.
With this single exception; however, there is scarcely any attention given to public observances of the Constitution. Certainly, neither logic nor history explains the snub. The historical parallels between the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are striking: both were drafted in Philadelphia, both were debated in the same building — Independence Hall, both were signed by several of the same delegates, both are considered founding documents of the nation, and both were bitterly controversial at the time. Yet today we remember one, but slight the other.
Some of the neglect of the Constitution is explainable if not explicable. Great drama attended the Declaration. It came about in tumultuous times, consummated the final break with England, and launched the nascent nation on a perilous confrontation with the greatest military power in the world. Then, too, the Declaration included some stirring literature based on ideas borrowed from political philosopher John Locke and refracted through Thomas Jefferson’s fertile pen — guided and inspired by a committee of four others, including Benjamin Franklin and John Adams [N1].
The Constitution on the other hand was produced by a convention, albeit an illustrious one, described by Jefferson absent in Paris as demi-gods, and dominated by political legends like Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and Gouverneur Morris. And their deliberation process was much more laborious, carried out over a span of four months by up to some 55 delegates appointed by their respective state legislatures.
Moreover, the Declaration was adopted and declared in a single day. The Constitution, by contrast, took more than nine months before it was ratified by enough states to go into effect.
So the Declaration is associated with a particular day — July 4th, but the Constitution has no such specific dating. September 17th, when it was signed by 39 delegates, is one key date, but several others are arguable, such as June 21, 1788 when the 9th state ratified or even April 30, 1789 when Washington was sworn in as the first president.
There are also other differences between the Declaration and the Constitution that help explain the enormous gap between the public attention paid to the respective anniversaries.
The Declaration is relatively short (1458 words) and stuffed with memorable prose and dramatic phrases about natural rights, self evident truths, unalienable rights, the people’s right to self government, and the right of oppressed people to overthrow the oppressors. The Constitution by contrast is much longer (some 4543 words) comprised of language more lawyerly than inspiring.
Finally, the Declaration is fixed and unchanging. The Constitution; however, has been amended 27 times and modified extensively by usage and interpretation. No one has ever proposed amending the Declaration of Independence.
So there are reasons why we remember so vividly one founding document but fail to pay equal attention to the other. Nevertheless, the contrast is jarring.
One reason for this is the huge gap between what the Declaration proffered and what it provided. The Declaration, for all its eloquent rhetoric about equality and unalienable rights, produced little of either in Jefferson’s generation or later. It is only in more modern times that the promises of the Declaration have been redeemed. And they have been redeemed ironically enough by the Constitution — as it has evolved to enshrine and enable many of the rights promised to Jefferson’s generation.
So as we observe this year’s Independence Day, it is fitting to also remember what made the Declaration so important. It was the first step toward establishing a government that could produce the very freedoms Jefferson’s document promised — a first step toward making the Constitution.
In the end the Declaration, important as it was, only guaranteed a doubtful revolution, while the Constitution guaranteed a durable nation. Indeed, without the Constitution we might not remember the Declaration today at all, for we likely would not have a United States of America in which to celebrate. It is the Declaration that we celebrate. But it was the Constitution that made the Declaration worth celebration. No better time to remember that then on the Fourth of July.
[N1] The Second Continental Congress selected a committee to draft a declaration of independence that consisted of John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Robert R. Livingston, and Roger Sherman.
The committe instructed Thomas Jefferson to write the declaration, and he began work on 11 June 1776. Following revisions, the Congress took it up on June 28. On July 2, the Continental Congress voted for independence and refined its Declaration of Independence before releasing it to the public on July 4th.
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Last Updated on Monday, 21 July 2008 04:24 |
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Opinion -
Guest Columns
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Peter Sellick
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Sunday, 15 June 2008 17:00 |
Subiaco, WA, Australia. There is something within us that signals that we are in the presence of an enthusiast. I had that feeling while watching Andrew Denton interview Jeff Kennett. After stalling question after question Jeff launched into a promo about depression and the organisation Beyond Blue (depression initiative).
This kind of behaviour is embarrassing because it breaks the norms of conversation. This is why we quickly move away from someone we meet at a party who displays enthusiast tendencies, there is no room for conversation, let alone a quiet critical discussion, you are there only to receive the message.
The historian John Pocock, in an article on Enlightenment England, refers to a gravestone said to record that a certain clergyman “served his Maker for forty years without the smallest sign of enthusiasm”. Admittedly, he also says that this may be a piece of historian’s folklore since he has never seen the said grave stone or possesses any reference to it or authentication.
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Last Updated on Sunday, 28 June 2009 19:15 |
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Opinion -
Guest Columns
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G. Terry Madonna & Michael L. Young
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Wednesday, 11 June 2008 17:00 |
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Lancaster, PA, USA. On the campaign trail, one of Hillary Clinton’s favorite quips was the one about it taking still another Clinton to clean up the messes of yet another Bush. John McCain, who will soon be running hard in Pennsylvania, isn’t known to seek advice from Hillary, but he might well adapt her tidy formulation to his uphill race in the state. In McCain’s case; however, both Hillary’s logic and her phrase are reversed; for McCain it won’t be another Clinton cleaning up the problems of a Bush, but rather adopting another Bush’s political game plan to finish up what a Clinton started.
The Bush in this case is Bush 41, George Herbert Walker Bush, and the last Republican presidential candidate to win in Pennsylvania. And the Clinton is Hillary herself, whose April campaign against Obama in Pennsylvania revealed the Democratic presumptive nominee’s grievous weaknesses among culturally conservative working class white voters. To win Pennsylvania McCain needs to pick up where Hillary ended, and he needs to follow Bush’s 1988 political map to get there.
More specifically, the argument for McCain in Pennsylvania is three-fold:
- McCain needs to beat Obama in Pennsylvania.
- Clinton showed how it can be done.
- George Bush Senior’s 1988 campaign shows where.
McCain Needs to Win Pennsylvania
On paper one can fashion an Electoral College map that gets John McCain into the White House without going through Pennsylvania. Indeed, George Bush won the White House twice despite losing the state twice. But moving from paper to the real world will be a difficult proposition in this challenging political year for Republicans.
Unlike either 2000 or 2004, many normally Bush states are in play — states like New Mexico, Colorado, Virginia, and Iowa, and some of them are probably going to end up in the Democratic column. This means that McCain must pick up some states that Bush lost as well as hold onto battleground states like Ohio and Florida. In fact, the tightest contests may well be in big electoral vote rich states like Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.
As much as in any other battleground state, Pennsylvania voters seem ripe for a McCain pitch. Filled with working class voters worried about the economy, they are also cultural conservatives, wary of liberal Democrats, fond of independents, and historically responsive to moderate Republicans. If McCain can hold on in Florida and Ohio and pick up Pennsylvania, that would probably seal the deal for him.
Clinton Showed it Can be Done
Hillary Clinton’s nine point victory over Barack Obama in the Pennsylvania Democratic primary revealed Barack Obama’s dual Achilles heels in the Keystone state: geography and demography. Geographically his problems are in the western part of the state; demographically they are with blue collar working class, Catholic, senior citizen, and union voters. Senator Clinton’s edge in the western counties over Obama was substantial: 79 percent in Fayette, 71 percent in Washington, 70 percent in Beaver, and 55 percent in Erie.
Obama’s poor performance among core Democratic constituencies in strategic Democratic counties represents a potential problem for him that transcends merely racially motivated voting. Many of these voters are conservative pro-life, pro-gun adherents, once known nationally as Reagan Democrats and in Pennsylvania itself known as Casey Democrats for those who supported Governor Robert P. Casey.
George Herbert Walker Bush’s 1988 Campaign Shows the Way
The last Republican presidential candidate to win the Keystone state was George Herbert Walker Bush, who won in a 51 to 48 percent squeaker. Whereas Clinton’s 2008 win revealed the demographics receptive to a McCain candidacy, Bush’s 1988 win provides the geography of a possible victory in the state.
The key to Bush’s 1988 victory was holding onto the Philadelphia suburbs while losing only two counties, Lackawanna and Philadelphia—east of the Susquehanna. Since 1988 state population shifts have made the eastern part of the state even more important. To win Pennsylvania, Republican candidates must now hold their core base in South Central Pennsylvania around Harrisburg, win the Philadelphia suburbs, and hold down large Democrat majorities in the western part of the state and in Philadelphia.
Alas for the GOP, this previously practiced strategy has proven more difficult to execute over the past several elections. Indeed, the problems Republicans now have winning in the East presents McCain with his most serious challenge, but also perhaps his most promising opportunity. For here McCain’s maverick, self-styled independence provides him with some realistic prospect, especially in the Philly suburbs which Bush 41 last won. These are the same Philly suburbs that Obama lost to Senator Clinton. McCain’s ability to attract Independent voters who live there in abundance gives him a realistic shot.
McCain’s roadmap to victory in Pennsylvania won’t be taking him onto any super highways. Instead he is going to have to walk it out region by region, county by county, and demographic by demographic—reminding suburban voters that they once liked Republicans and that he, McCain, is the kind of Republican they liked.
It won’t be easy. Obama has a slight lead as the race begins, pegged at between two and eight points by Real Clear Politics. Moreover, Pennsylvania has only voted for one Republican for president in the past five elections. And Bush fatigue aggravated by a weak economy and Iraq make the climate for Republicans unpromising.
These are the conditions McCain faces as we enter the summer months. His options are few. He probably must win Pennsylvania to win the White House. Challenging as that may be, it is clearly not unthinkable for him to do it. Two months ago a Clinton showed how it could be done; twenty years earlier a Bush showed him where to do it. November will reveal if either of those lessons has been learned.
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Last Updated on Friday, 11 July 2008 09:46 |
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The TS-Si News Service
and the TS-Si Research Service are collaborations of TS-Si officials, staff, contributors, and corresponding institutions. The contents do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si or its owners, participants, partners, or affiliates.