Trying to Turn the Page

The personal attacks on Obama this weekend by Sarah Palin -- trying to bring up the old Bill Ayres storyline -- preview a little bit of what we will be seeing over the next 30 days. Team McCain has seen its standing plummet over the last couple of weeks as the economic crisis has gripped the nation. McCain has come to a simple conclusion: the economy as an issue is not McCain's friend. Because the nation blames the crisis much more on President Bush and the Republicans than on the Democrats, McCain's standing has taken a much bigger hit than Obama's as the markets have fallen. Therefore, the GOP campaign is going to try desperately to move the nation away from the economy, and back onto the footing of an election that is a referendum on Barack Obama himself.

Turning the page is critical for McCain to improve his national numbers and bring Obama down. If he can't succeed on this score, and the election ends up most of all as a broad economic vote on the Republican Party, he knows he has no shot. Therefore, his focus on Obama personally is pretty much all he can do.

As a result, we can expect 30 days of particularly nasty attacks lobbed from the red side to the blue side. I fully expect ads prominently featuring Rev. Wright, and other racially-tinged stuff. Already, when Palin intimated to a crowd that wink-wink, nudge-nudge, Obama does not care about America like most Americans, we are seeing this. It obviously did not take long.

We'll see if the McCain campaign can turn the page away from the economy, but here's guessing that it won't be terribly easy anymore. Still, I readily admit that McCain does not have many better options to try to put himself back into the driver's seat.