Loading ...John McCain’s campaign and Trent Lott’s house
flockwoodANALYSIS
I’ve been thinking a lot today about John McCain’s struggling presidential campaign and Sen. Trent Lott’s beach house in Pascagoula, Miss. Or, more accurately, former Senator Trent Lott’s formerbeach house in sunny Pascagoula.
I visited the Gulf Coast less than three weeks after Hurricane Katrina destroyed much of the region, and I drove past the lot where Lott’s gorgeous home once stood. It had survived Hurricane Camille and a hundred lesser storms, but it was swept away by Katrina’s storm surge — 25, 26, 27 feet high.
As I looked at the rubble, nobody asked what the house had done wrong.Nobody blamed the builders or searched for flaws in the blueprints. It was simply understood: When the winds blow this hard and the storm waters rise this high, no house is going to survive.
Three years after Katrina, Mississippi — like most of the Bible Belt — will probably vote Republican. White born-again Christians are rallying around McCain more than perhaps any other group. (A LA Times/Bloomberg poll released Oct. 14 shows McCain beating Obama 69 to 20 among white evangelicals… By comparison, Bush carried this group 78 to 22 percent when he ran against John Kerry in 2004.)
But much of the rest of the country is moving into the Obama column, if the polls are right, and even Virginia, North Carolina and Missouri appear to be in play.
Each morning, I wake up and read the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and realclearpolitics.com and politico.com, Drudge and the New York Times and the Washington Post. I pour over the fine print from the polls. And I read the Monday Morning quarterbacks, who try to explain 1.) what McCain is doing wrong and 2.) what he should do to turn the campaign around. Much of the advice is contradictory — More Palin, Less Palin; Go negative. Go positive. Focus on the base. Zone in on independents. Etc., etc.
Many of the experts play the blame game instead of focusing on the obvious. Sen. McCain has been hit by the political “Storm of the Century.” A category 5 supercyclone. Wall Street’s in a panic. Housing prices are plummeting. Recession’s in the air. People are afraid about the future. On top of that, President George W. Bush is phenomenally unpopular. Carter was never this disliked. Nixon’s negative ratings never got this high. Most presidential candidates collapse when the currents are this strong.
If McCain somehow pulls it off, he’ll be the exception.
Which brings me back to my visit to Pascagoula. As I drove along the Gulf Coast three years ago, I saw, on the rarest of occasions, a house that had — miraculously — survived the deluge. They were well-built structures, I’m sure, but they were also very, very lucky.
At this point, 20 days from Election Day, the political Storm of the Century hasn’t washed McCain away. He’s trailing in virtually all of the polls. He’s probably lost a few shingles. A few of the Republican pundits have climbed on the rooftop or into the trees. But he’s still standing.
That’s the good news for the Senator from Arizona: The storm hasn’t smashed him to smithereens yet. The bad news: there’s still nearly three weeks of potentially inclement weather ahead.
