The US Presidential Race: debates, half-wits, and poll tracks

This is gonna be a long one, as I'm getting back to blogging out the US Presidential Election after several months out of the loop - I enjoyed the mammoth struggle between Obama and Clinton in the Democratic primaries, but once Obama won it, things got a bit boring for quite a while.

Then we had the whole Sarah Palin thing for the Republicans - a huge bounce, with McCain leading for a couple of weeks, then gradually slipping away as more and more Americans seemed to realise that whatever the glamour factor of having Palin on the ticket, she was a dangerous lunatic along the lines of Stillson from The Dead Zone (in many ways the archetypal Republican politician), most likely to lead the US into nuclear war with Russia (or whoever) at the first opportunity.

In 1996 I was standing in the British Rail (now National Express) ticket office at Walthamstow Central buying a ticket with a couple of mates, and a guy ran in and out the ticket hall at top speed. Five seconds later another guy weilding a bicycle chain ran in, stopped for two seconds to shout at us "who wants it?" then ran off again in pursuit of his poor victim. Politically speaking, Sarah Palin is the equivalent of that guy with the bicycle chain. Initially scary but then you realise she's a small time villain jumped up to the big stage. Although of course she is really no worse than Bush (Jnr) or Reagan, each of whom were, for my money, equally clueless... to say nothing of Dan Quayle.

I don't know how Palin will do in the V-P debate next week, or if it matters much given that her star seems to have fallen so fast. I don't know much about Joe Biden but if he can walk and answer his Blackberry at the same time he should be OK. Palin's performance on various chat shows recently seems to have been so lame that the Republican campaign managers are doing everything they can to keep her out of the spotlight lest she drop yet another clanger. Of course it could be the old Dubya Bush tactic of playing dumb and then progressing from no-brain to half a brain at just the right moment to exceed public expectations. (This apparently is what happened in the sequence of Bush-Kerry debates in '04: Bush was total shit in the first one, then marginally less shit in the others - giving the impression that he was on a roll. Clever stuff.) In any case, it will be interesting to see if Biden can find a killer line to equal Lloyd Bentsen's "Senator, you're no Jack Kennedy" against Quayle in '88.

But more interesting than this is the first Presidential debate, which took place on Friday - despite earlier assurances from John McCain that he would not show up. My impressions (and see for yourself on the BBC site) were:

Obama: competent without being amazing. Did fairly well on the economy although in the current situation it would have been almost impossible for him not to. I thought he was good on foreign policy - McCain seemed to think that the only way to assess a situation in Iraq/Afghanistan was to go there oneself, in which case presumably we can get rid of all military intelligence personnel and just parachute the President in whenever we need to find something out. Yeah, right. (Of course, there are good grounds for wanting to see with one's own eyes what's going on, given that the Bush administration lies all the time - but on foreign policy, McCain supports the Bush administration. In fact he's even more wedded to crazy militaristic adventures in foreign policy than Bush/Cheney were, if that's possible.)

It seems to me that Obama's more open and conciliatory demeanour will go down well with voters - he called McCain "John" a lot, said when he thought McCain was right about something, gave credit where credit was due. Some would say this is too "nice guy" an approach and he should have got down and dirty more but remember that the job to do here is to win over the swing voters. No point playing the tough guy to please your hardcore support - this is a good time to try to convince people who may not be wanting to vote at all 'cos they are so f***ed off with the whole thing (and there are tens of millions of people like that in the US). Obama did lay into McCain at strategic points, and it worked pretty well.

McCain: body language and general posture was pretty bad - he looks like he's been taking lessons from Andrew Green of Migration Watch. Certainly not the complete moron that some pro-Obama commentators have been claiming - but not brilliantly articulate, either. Very negative in most of the exchanges. Did a reasonably good job of criticising the Bush administration where he felt things needed to be done differently (e.g. the pork barrel - I've no idea if McCain really would get rid of substantial amounts of pork-barrelling - it seems unlikely given the corporate domination of US politics - but to the uninitiated voter it probably came across well.)

One thing is - McCain just looks really old. This may not matter - from footage of the Reagan-Mondale debates in '84 Reagan looks half dead and he still won - but I get the feeling the guy is a US Brezhnev and could drop dead at any minute. If that happens, of course, you guys get President Palin. The Democrats should be running scare stuff on this all the time.

The general media consensus was that it was close-run with Obama just shading it - and I'd go along with that. Anything less than a big win for McCain in the last two debates is disastrous for the Republicans as the economic crisis has come along at just the right time for the Democrats, who must be very relieved that real issues are under discussion now, rather than whether Sarah Palin is a pig with lipstick or not.

My feeling now is that barring some sort of major tragedy (another terrorist attack? Joe Biden revealed to be Barney the dinosaur in disguise? etc.) the Democrats have got this sown up. The excellent polling site FiveThirtyEight agrees with me, at least at the moment. Even so, I'll be a little nervous come election day in November (probably with a beer in my hand.) There's always a danger this could be like Labour in the UK in 1992, after all. (Someone should tell Barack Obama about the Sheffield rally). And I'll be more nervous afterwards if Obama gets in - what's he gonna do about the economy? Because he said very little on Friday to make me think he had any idea what to do about the onset of recession, let alone depression... are we looking at a Jimmy Carter Mark 2 here? I leave you with that thought.