Huey Long, are you listening? They're singing your song
By Tom Baxter
Southern Political Report
October 8, 2008 — We’ve had a great presidential race this year, by almost all estimates one of the most fascinating contests in the nation’s history. The two candidates who took the stage for the second presidential debate in Nashville each followed a remarkable path to get there. But there was a moment or two Tuesday night that felt like that overtime SEC tournament basketball game in Atlanta last March, when the players became aware the rafters were shaking and stopped dribbling in the middle of overtime. In that case a tornado was passing directly over Philips Arena. Last night, a town-hall debate was being staged in the middle of an economic meltdown. You could hear the rumble of the fiscal tornado in the answers to the first question about helping Americans facing financial ruin, with Barack Obama scapegoating the AIG execs who went on a junket, and John McCain throwing fiscal conservatism to the winds with a program that would buy up all the bad home loans in America and renegotiate them at new prices so people can stay in their gently devalued homes. Huey Long, if he was listening to those answers in the great beyond, was having his best moment in decades. You could hear the rumble even more clearly a few minutes later when Teresa Finch asked her question. “How can we trust either of you with our money when both parties got us into this global economic crisis?” the obviously angry voter said. That crisis has, in the minds of many voters, brought this brilliant campaign to an early close, with John McCain’s prospects dimming as the economy worsens. McCain has to battle that perception, and he did so gamely Tuesday night. But there’s only so much you can do on the court when the scoreboard is shaking. Obama, some observers have noted, seems just a little greyer than he did when this campaign started. That likely helped in in the focus groups that sifted through this debate. In this debate he came off as more coldly analytical than McCain and less able to communicate with voters. He seemed especially flat answering the last, as Brokaw put it, “zenlike” question: “What don’t you know and how will you learn it?” He couldn’t stretch farther than a few choice stump-speech lines. But in a performance less electric than those which got him there, Obama was just grey enough to benefit from a contrast suggested by his opponent. Twice, McCain spoke of the need for a “cool hand,” or a “steady hand at the the tiller.” But he was in the unfortunate position of needing to be on the attack against Obama, which tended to make his calmer, less aggressive opponent look like the cool hand. Going back to Ms. Finch’s question again, in closing. Could the profound nature of this crisis and the apocalyptic rhetoric swirling around it drive more voters to Bob Barr and Ralph Nader? |
