On Monday, December 1, Barack Obama, who had kicked off his campaign a year earlier touting his opposition to the war in Iraq, introduced his national security team to the public. As secretary of state there was Hillary Clinton, his opponent in the primaries who had voted for the war in Iraq; as national security adviser James Jones, a friend and supporter of John McCain's who had also backed the war in Iraq; and as secretary of defense Robert Gates, a carry-over appointed by George W. Bush, whose administration Obama and all of his party (except for Joe Lieberman) had spent the past four years running against.
On Tuesday, December 2, Saxby Chambliss, who had beaten Democrat Jim Martin by 3 points on Election Day but failed to reach the 50 percent-plus-one-vote level required by Georgia law, won his run-off election by 15 points, an impressive gain in just four weeks. These two incidents are connected, and each helps to explain why the other one happened: Chambliss's spread and the Obama selections both are the signs of a swing back to "normal" (or to "normal while in a recession") after a brief intense move around the election caused by the first wave of the crash and the bailout that swung the public mood to the left. Two public swings in the month of September help to explain just what happened--and why the mandate for Obama may not be as big as it seemed.
Hard as it is now to remember, in the
first weeks of September, McCain had been forging ahead. He led in most of the national polls, led in the swing states, was winning independents, women, and Hillary voters, and extending his range into enemy country, turning some blue states pale pink. In a deep hole since the 2006 midterms, the generic numbers for the Republican party had even begun to edge up. A Gallup poll released on September 11 showed the Republicans with a 4-point lead in the generic ballot. And then came September 15.
Let us revisit those thrilling two weeks in September, when the financial world as we know it seemed to vanish completely, and the Republican party shot out both its feet. September 15 was the day Lehman Brothers failed, leading to a cascading financial implosion and the announcement three days later by Treasury secretary Henry Paulson and Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke that unless the government bought up $700 billion of failed financial instruments, credit would freeze up throughout the nation, and indeed the world. With experts forecasting disaster, McCain left the trail and went back to Washington to help move the bailout through Congress, where most of his party was firmly opposed. After five days of haggling, the bill reached the floor of the House on September 29, where it failed by 12 votes. Republicans were blamed for the failure, and for the subsequent collapse of the market. (They did not help themselves by going on television to complain that Nancy Pelosi had injured their feelings with a red-meat, partisan speech.) A revised bill was passed four days later, but it looked too late and too little. McCain now looked weak, and his party feckless. And the election was one month away.
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