The decisive news from last night is that John McCain can turn his missiles on the Democrats, particularly Barack Obama, from this point forward. McCain was in perfect form this evening, suggesting subtly that Obama has a messiah complex about saving America while McCain humbly understands that America saved him. It's only the beginning. In this line of attack, McCain was echoing the Paul Krugmans and Clintonites suggesting that the Obama campaign is a "cult."
Faced with a genuine and surprising mass movement, the elites' immediately question the motives and mental stability of anyone willing to give up their creature comforts to campaign for a cause. By that standard, the American revolution was a "cult". The earliest town meetings were a threat to the royal governor of Massachusetts who complained that "the Meanest Inhabitants...by their constant Attendance there generally are the majority and outvote the Gentlemen, Merchants, Substantial Traders and all the better part of the Inhabitants."
But McCain's own story, apart from what he says of Obama, has its own power. I was in Hanoi last month looking at the very spot that McCain broke his arms parachuting from his fighter-bomber into an urban lake. I talked with the famed novelist Bao Ninh, author of Sorrows of War, who was one of the teenagers who rushed to pull McCain out of the lake into his six years of captivity. It was a story of epic proportions on all sides, like nothing that Obama (or Clinton) has ever experienced.
McCain is a worthy Republican candidate with an understated heroism of character, able to win independents and Western voters, who tends to be trusted by Americans who feel threatened by war.
Democratic consultants who plan to attack McCain on issues of age, character or temperament should forget such nastiness. They will only push independents and some Democrats in McCain's direction.
The real issues which many Democratic consultants and insiders fear to address are Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan and "national security". They are haunted by the party's anti-war past, even though they understand that the Vietnam war was a disaster. McCain's strategists smell this Democratic vulnerability. They will try to achieve a bipartisan consensus that there is something called "Islamo-fascism", that the menace is unified, and that it is evil, that it can be confronted only by military force. Thus they can force Democrats into arguing that Iraq is a distraction from Afghanistan, that Marines should be transferred from Baghdad to Kabul in a downward spiral of fighting al Qaeda. They may find themselves trapped in McCain's battlefield of assumptions.
The hemorrhaging loser tonight was Hillary Clinton, who appeared caught up in escapist fantasy in El Paso as Obama swept through three more primaries. So far, she has failed to settle on a convincing contrast with Obama as time runs out. Her greatest problem is that 75 percent of voters have either voted against her (in Democratic primaries), have unfavorable opinions of her (40 percent overall), or even hate her (half of Republicans). She still can win against McCain in a Democratic year, but those are overwhelming odds. She seems entirely focused now on simply not losing in the primaries. But even Clinton wins in Texas, Ohio, and Pennsylvania - not guaranteed - will leave her short of a delegate majority and she could be trailing Obama 38-12 after the fifty primaries.
That leaves Obama, and little can be said about the brilliance of his campaign so far. He now is slightly ahead of Clinton in the delegate count, and eight percentage points ahead of McCain in the best polling data (six points more than Clinton). He is the frontrunner and, if past history is any guide, Obama will face the magnified media scrutiny and negative attacks that often accompany that status.
Any sudden and surprising development -- a hawkish turn by Obama that shocks his supporters, or an unknown scandal -- could demoralize or divide his idealistic and voluntary base. So far, there is no sign of these dangers on the horizon.
In an earlier version of this blog mistakenly sent out, I erred in implying that the Obama movement is passionately organized around proven campaign tactics and values of solidarity alone. If there is any "cult" in question, it is the cliques of New York Times military writers like Michael Gordon and Judith Miller, and the neo-liberal free traders who dominate the op-ed pages. If anything, the Obama movement needs to push its inherent populist and progressive spirit upwards to the higher circles where many of Obama's policy advisers themselves adhere to military, corporate and trade paradigms rejected or questioned by most of the world. They are eerily reminiscent of John Kennedy's "best and brightest" that brought us the Bay of Pigs and Vietnam, before the young president took a different course. (More to come on the community organizing tradition and the Obama campaign.)
TOM HAYDEN is the author of The Tom Hayden Reader (2008) and Ending the War in Iraq (2007)