Come on baby...don't fear the reaperThrough me you pass into the city of woe
Through me you pass into eternal pain:
Through me among the people lost for aye
Justice the founder of my fabric mov'd
to rear me was the task of power divine,
Supremest wisdom, and primeval love
Before me things create were none, save things
eternal, and eternal I endure.
All hope abandon ye who enter here
Such characters in colour dim I mark'd
over a portal's lofty arch inscrib'd
-Dante Alighieri
Two weeks after the Republican convention in St. Paul, Minn., John McCain and Sarah Palin were striding forward toward victory.
They had erased the eight-point lead Barack Obama had opened up in Denver and watched as one blue state after another moved into the toss-up category.
That is ancient history now.
Since mid-September, the stock market has cratered, losing half of the $8 trillion that has vanished since October 2007. All five of America's great investment banks- Bear Stearns, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley have either ceased to be independant or ceased to be.
The nation's largest savings and loan, Washington Mutual, and the largest insurance company AIG, have gone belly up, with the federal bailout of the latter costing $100 billion and counting.
Perhaps $3 trillion of the $8 trillion in stock value that is gone disappeared after passage of the $700 billion federal bailout of Wall Street.
No bottom is in sight to the worst market crash since 1929. Recession is now certain. George W. Bush has fallen to 26 percent approval, a level unseen since Richard Nixon was driven from office in the Watergate summer of '74. Four in five think the nation is on the wrong track.
Yet, Obama has only a six-point lead in an averaging of national polls. While he has moved ahead in Ohio, Florida, North Carolina and Virginia, one senses America is not so much rallying to him as running away from a Republican brand that is now on the same shelf with Chinese baby formula.
Obama still has not closed the sale. He has overtaken McCain not because of any brilliant campaign he has conducted but because of the dreadful news pouring out ot Wall Street. McCain and Palin are being dragged down by Dow Jones, Not Barack Obama.
As of today, the country is not so much voting for Barack and the Democrats as it is preparing to vote against the Republicans.
Consider: the Congress, whose Democratic ranks the nation is getting ready to expand- the Congress led by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid- has an approval rating half that of Bush.
Indeed, looking back on the Year of Barack, 2008, it is clear he has never closed the sale, either with the people or his own party.
Each time the voters take a long second look at Barack, their positive first impressions seem to dissipate. Barack is a weak closer.
Herein lies McCain's hope. The country wants change, but it has not concluded it wants Obama. But if John McCain cannot raise grave doubts about his agenda, his associates, his record, his character, his fitness to be president, Obama is going to win by default.
Obama has succeeded in the debates by playing defense. By his cool demeanor and persona, he has diminished apprehensions about an Obama presidency There is no evidence of surging enthusiam.
The Obama media are well aware of Obamas' Achilles' heel, his great vulnerability, the doubts about him that still exist in the public mind. That is why they are near hysterical about Palin's ripping of Obama for palling around with domestic terrorists like William Ayers the Weatherman radical who conspired to bomb the Capitol and Pentagaon.
The mainstream media call this irrelevant as it was so long ago.
This election is not over. Yet, even if McCain gets a bit of luck, a dead cat bounce on Wall Street, he must persuade the nation that Obama is an unaccepable occupant of the White House if he is to win.
Palin appears ready to take the heat to make that case. But McCain seems abmivalent to the point of being bipolar on whether he wants to take responsibility for peeling the hide off Barack Obama.
Perhaps it comes down to what McCain really thinks about an Obama presidency, and how he wants to be remembered by history.
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