Reply #15: David "axis of evil" Frum [View All]

Sometimes campaigns and candidates make the difference. Very possibly, a different campaign or a different candidate could have won the presidency for the Democrats in 2004. (Most Republicans cited Dick Gephardt as the Democrat they feared most, John Kerry as the candidate they feared least.) Not impossibly, as Bob Shrum suggests, a different vice presidential candidate might have helped Al Gore in 2000.

But 2008? On the cable chat shows, the interviewers ask: “What’s the one thing John McCain has to do to turn this thing around?”

“Well Chris, two things that would really help would be a 5,000 point rise in the Dow and a 20 percent jump in home prices over the next three weeks. Failing that, I suppose he might talk about the 1960’s some more.”

...

Trouble is, Barack Obama’s biography is not very interesting. Hillary Clinton, at least, worked with actual radicals at a time when radicalism was a going concern. But Obama? McCain’s attack on him is the equivalent of the William McKinley campaign attacking William Jennings Bryan for having kept company with Nathan Bedford Forrest decades after the Civil War. Yes, the old rebel was an unrepentant traitor. Mostly though, he was all washed up.

Republicans have been fighting this second American civil war for eleven election cycles now. It’s been a good run! But just as 19th-Century Republicans eventually ran out of Union generals from Ohio, so the modern Republican Party has bumped up against the statute of limitations on campaigns against hippies.