Victor Davis Hanson: Reasons for hope on the first Tuesday in November
Of course, this is a Democratic year. The public is tired of George Bush and eight years of an incumbent administration. War, Wall Street, and the absence of a conservative Reagan-like charismatic figure should make it easy for a Democrat to win the presidency. After a nearly miraculous McCain surge in September, following the Republican Convention and Palin nomination, the Republicans are once again floundering — and a sense of utter despair has now set in among conservatives.
Wall Street melted down. The New York–Washington media elite went ballistic over vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Alaskan mom of five in near suicidal fashion was ordered by the campaign to put her head in the Charlie Gibson-Katie Couric guillotine. A trailing McCain — while sober and workmanlike in the first two debates — failed to close the ring and hammer the agile Obama as a charismatic charlatan.
The result is that with not much more than three weeks left in the campaign, a number of conservatives have all but accepted (if a few not eager for) an Obama victory. Others are angry at the McCain campaign’s supposed reluctance to go after Obama’s hyper-liberal, hyper-partisan Senate record, his dubious Chicago coterie, his serial flip-flops, and his inexperience. And how, most wonder, can McCain regain the lead lost three weeks ago, when the media has given up any pretense of disinterested coverage, time is growing ever more short, prominent conservatives such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, and Kathleen Parker have suggested Sarah Palin would be unfit to assume the presidency, and former Romney supporters are raising again their unease with the once again too moderate-sounding McCain?
Yet for all the gloom, there are several reasons why this race is by no means over.
First, it is not clear that panic, hysteria, and the “Great Depression” will continue to be the headlines and lead-ins each night for the next three weeks. We may be soon reaching a bottom in the stock market. Sometime in the next few days, wiser investors should see that trillions of global dollars are now piling up and could begin to prime the economy — and that still valuable stocks, for a brief period, are up for sale at once-in-a-lifetime bargains. With the sudden collapse of oil prices, the West has been given a staggering reprieve of hundreds of billions of dollars in savings on its imported fuel bills. That economy too will result in more liquidity at home. Given the shameless behavior of Wall Street, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it will be unlikely that we will revert soon to the Wild West speculation that had for the last six years transformed the once pedestrian notion of seeing a house as a home and refashioned it into either a politically correct entitlement or a Las Vegas poker chip to be thrown down on the roulette table.
It is still possible that, by the week before the election, there will be a sense of respite rather than continued anger and panic — and any day in which hysteria is not the topic of the day benefits McCain. In this regard, McCain must keep reminding in simple fashion that Freddie and Fannie were catalysts that drew in the Wall Street sharks: crooked officials cooked the books to get mega-bonuses; they got away with their crimes by lavishing money on mostly Democratic legislators (including Obama); and hand-in-glove they all covered — and still are covering — their tracks under a reprehensible politically correct cynicism....
Read entire article at National Review Online
Wall Street melted down. The New York–Washington media elite went ballistic over vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. The Alaskan mom of five in near suicidal fashion was ordered by the campaign to put her head in the Charlie Gibson-Katie Couric guillotine. A trailing McCain — while sober and workmanlike in the first two debates — failed to close the ring and hammer the agile Obama as a charismatic charlatan.
The result is that with not much more than three weeks left in the campaign, a number of conservatives have all but accepted (if a few not eager for) an Obama victory. Others are angry at the McCain campaign’s supposed reluctance to go after Obama’s hyper-liberal, hyper-partisan Senate record, his dubious Chicago coterie, his serial flip-flops, and his inexperience. And how, most wonder, can McCain regain the lead lost three weeks ago, when the media has given up any pretense of disinterested coverage, time is growing ever more short, prominent conservatives such as George Will, Charles Krauthammer, David Brooks, and Kathleen Parker have suggested Sarah Palin would be unfit to assume the presidency, and former Romney supporters are raising again their unease with the once again too moderate-sounding McCain?
Yet for all the gloom, there are several reasons why this race is by no means over.
First, it is not clear that panic, hysteria, and the “Great Depression” will continue to be the headlines and lead-ins each night for the next three weeks. We may be soon reaching a bottom in the stock market. Sometime in the next few days, wiser investors should see that trillions of global dollars are now piling up and could begin to prime the economy — and that still valuable stocks, for a brief period, are up for sale at once-in-a-lifetime bargains. With the sudden collapse of oil prices, the West has been given a staggering reprieve of hundreds of billions of dollars in savings on its imported fuel bills. That economy too will result in more liquidity at home. Given the shameless behavior of Wall Street, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it will be unlikely that we will revert soon to the Wild West speculation that had for the last six years transformed the once pedestrian notion of seeing a house as a home and refashioned it into either a politically correct entitlement or a Las Vegas poker chip to be thrown down on the roulette table.
It is still possible that, by the week before the election, there will be a sense of respite rather than continued anger and panic — and any day in which hysteria is not the topic of the day benefits McCain. In this regard, McCain must keep reminding in simple fashion that Freddie and Fannie were catalysts that drew in the Wall Street sharks: crooked officials cooked the books to get mega-bonuses; they got away with their crimes by lavishing money on mostly Democratic legislators (including Obama); and hand-in-glove they all covered — and still are covering — their tracks under a reprehensible politically correct cynicism....