It wasn't long ago that Barack Obama's campaign for the White House was, in the eyes of the Washington pundit class, in serious danger.
Two weeks ago, McCain was riding high, flush with a strong bounce in the polls from the Republican convention and his choice of Sarah Palin to be his running mate. Obama's numbers in the critical battleground states of Ohio, Colorado and New Hampshire (and elsewhere) were sinking into the mid-to-low 40s while the newly minted McCain-Palin ticket, all bright and shiny and fresh, was reaching up to scrape the critical 50 percent mark. Democratic donors and activists felt that nervous, sickening feeling in the pit of their stomachs — that they'd seen this movie before in 2004, and 2000, and 1988, and so on.
Politico.com found the perfect quote to summarize the growing panic among the Democratic Party's leadership: "A major Democratic fundraiser described it a good bit more starkly after digesting the polls of recent days: ‘I'm so depressed. It's happening again. It's a nightmare.'"
Things have changed profoundly in the last week and a half. Obama is in the driver's seat of the campaign once again, riding a wave of state and national polls which are almost invariably putting him in the lead in the places he needs to win. For the first time, national polls are showing him breaking the 50 percent mark, a critical milestone for a party which has not won a majority of the presidential vote since LBJ routed Barry Goldwater in 1964. States which voted for Bush in 2004, like Colorado, Iowa, New Mexico and Virginia, are looking as though they'll flip to Obama in November. And the Obama financial juggernaut continues apace, raising a cool $66 million in August — the most amount raised in a month by any campaign in history. Politico's nervous Democratic fundraiser is no doubt breathing a bit easier.
Why the sudden shift? Part of the answer is the simple fact that part of McCain's lead in the polls was a product of the fleeting bounce that usually follows a party's national convention. Obama's numbers spiked in the days following the Democratic convention, but the Republican convention followed so closely after it (and McCain picked Sarah Palin the day after Obama's acceptance speech in a clever ploy to stomp on the glowing news accounts Obama would otherwise have earned) that his bounce vanished in a matter of days. The McCain bounce, however, had much more time to affect the polls. The recent drop in McCain's numbers is partially a reflection of the inevitable fading of the bounce from the Republican convention.
But the other factor at play is the recent crisis on Wall Street, which coincides nearly exactly with the sudden spike in Sen.Obama's numbers. The financial meltdown on Wall Street may come to be seen as the economic equivalent of 9/11. People are scared, really scared, and the Democratic Party's long-held advantage on economic issues, coupled with McCain's weakness on them, is allowing Obama to pull away. Most people, myself included, don't fully understand the nature and origin of the problem, and absolutely nobody is sure of the best way to get us out. It's a frightening thing when those smart people on the financial shows start using the phrase "Great Depression 2.0." And in times like this, McCain's famous line, "The issue of economics is not something I've understood as well as I should," is getting people with retirement portfolios nervous.
As we march toward November, look for Sen. Obama's poll numbers to be closely aligned with how pants-wettingly terrified people are about a full-blown economic meltdown.
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Michael Sherry is a senior majoring in political science. He can be reached at Michael.Sherry@tufts.edu.
