THE Democrats are having their flop-sweat moment.
Barack Obama should be way out in front. The Republicans are in terrible shape. They’ve nominated an old white-haired dude who’ll be the kind of president who’ll yell from the Oval Office window, “You kids get off my lawn!” The economy is like wounded roadkill, flopping around, unable to get going but unwilling to lay down and die. Yet John McCain is pulling ahead of Obama.
The latest Reuters poll has Grandpa Munster up five percentage points over our secular messiah. The Real Clear Politics average of polls has the two in a virtual tie. If the race were held today and McCain took the toss-up states where he’s now ahead, he’d be the next president.
Yes, it’s early. McCain has had a good couple weeks. But these were his first good couple weeks since he secured the nomination. Meanwhile, with the exception of the Jeremiah Wright unpleasantness, Obama has had a good couple years.
The winds at the Democrats’ backs are hurricane-force, and yet Obama’s holding steady.
Ask the typical Obama supporter why this should be so and you’ll get a range of answers. Some mutter about Fox News conspiracies and how Karl Rove-like aliens are doing terrible things with probes of proctological exactitude. Others shake their heads at the racism of anyone who could have a problem with a left-wing pol with almost no experience, who often sounds like his campaign slogan is: “People of Earth! Stop Your Bickering. I Am From Harvard, And I’m Here To Help.”
Perhaps therein lies the answer: Obama’s problems are the ones Democrats always have at the presidential level: He’s an elitist.
Oh, I know. Upon reading that, some earnest Ivy League interns at some liberal magazine have burst into laughter, saying: “Don’t you conservatives understand? Democrats care about the little guy. They’re on the side of the proletariat – I mean workers – and as Obama has so eloquently put it, if the workers would only stop clinging to their silly sky god and guns, they’d understand that.”
Liberalism is often a problem at the presidential level. Cultural liberalism is a burden. Haughty cultural liberalism is a disaster in the making.
For good or ill, the presidency is a cultural institution as much as it is a political institution. And it’s fundamentally a culturally conservative one. Fair or not, many see Obama as a cultural outsider. This week, Chicago Mayor Richard Daley said of Obama’s friendship with former left-wing domestic terrorist Bill Ayers: “They’re friends. So what?”
Columnist Michael Barone noticed during the primaries that, with the exception of the black vote, Obama’s support within the Democratic Party is comprised almost entirely of cultural liberals. He dubbed this intra-Democratic split a divide between “academics and Jacksonians.” The Jacksonians are working-class, culturally conservative whites. The academics formed the base for Howard Dean, Bill Bradley, Michael Dukakis, Gary Hart and George McGovern.
But you need Jacksonians more than you need academics to win a general election, which is one reason why no non-Southern Democrat has won the presidency in nearly a half-century. (It’s not that voters love Southerners. Rather, Southern Democrats simply seem more Jacksonian.)
Obama may still win, of course, proving that America is not only ready for a black president, but a cultural liberal as well. If he loses, though, you can be sure Democrats will claim he lost not because he is a black and more charming Michael Dukakis, but simply because he is black. Because liberals are never wrong.