Is this a one-candidate election?

[babylonsister]

http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/07/16/it-s-an-election-not-a-referendum.aspx

It's an Election, Not a Referendum


Michael Tomasky takes on the conventional wisdom that the presidential race is "all about Obama:

Some leading conventional-wisdom meisters, like Time's Mark Halperin, like to say that this race is completely about Obama. When they say that, you can hear them setting themselves up as Obama's judge and jury, just waiting for him to trip up so they can say that he's failing to "close the deal" and there are just "too many questions" about him, as they nudge their readers toward McCain, a media darling for many years now.

I think Tomasky is probably going a bit too far with his suggestion that the "it's all about Obama" notion is intentionally designed to help John McCain. But he does have a point. Any election is equally about the two candidates. There's no point in measuring one candidate except in the context of comparison with the other.

Now, it's probably true as an empirical matter that the public's perception of Obama matters more than its perception of McCain -- people want a Democrat to win, and Obama just has to make himself acceptable in order to win. But I think lots of reporters and pundits have internalized this notion to the extent that they are covering the race as if it's a simple up-or-down vote on Obama. Hence the intense focus on Obama's relatively modest ideological repositioning and total lack of attention to McCain's massive rightward shift.

I don't think this is a ploy designed to help McCain, but I do think it has that effect. After all, if Obama does not pass the threshold of acceptability, then we'll have a President McCain. The voters should weigh what that would be like, too.

[HughBeaumont]

1. More like "It's all about how well the media can shit on Obama".

While at the same time propping up a fossilized and backwards candidate that has absolutely NOTHING at all going for him.

If people (that includes many closet HRC fan pessimists still on this board) are expecting a miracle worker, they need to just keep on looking. Bewsh and his cronies messed this country up beyond short-term repair; I'd venture to say worse than any administration has since Nixon and Reagan. Obama will need two terms if expectations are that he'll "fix things". The solution would not be to elect more of the same kind of damage kings, though.

[NYC_SKP]

2. Hopefully, as we get closer to the election,

the dynamic will change.

We're just spanning time right now, the media are restless.

Like a long, long, marathon, our runner is pacing himself, and well.

Once running mates are selected and we schedule debates, hopefully the narrative will change.

Obama is wise to reserve any extraordinary attempt to dominate the news cycle, better to just keep doing what he's doing and come out swinging closer to November.