American voters are staggering under the worst financial crisis since at least 1982. Asset values are tumbling, consumer spending is contracting, and a recession is visibly on the way. This crisis follows upon seven years in which middle-class incomes have stagnated and Republican economic management has been badly tarnished. Anybody who imagines that an election can be won under these circumstances by banging on about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright is … to put it mildly … severely under-estimating the electoral importance of pocketbook issues.We conservatives are sending a powerful, inadvertent message with this negative campaign against Barack Obama's associations and former associations: that we lack a positive agenda of our own and that we don’t care about the economic issues that are worrying American voters.
The problem for Mr. Frum is that he seems to think that:
If this were only a campaign effort, isolated to McCain, then Americans wouldn't be voting against Republicans across the board.
If this were a recent development, then Bush's negatives wouldn't be so terrible.
The fact of the matter is, the Republicans have RUN THE GOVERNMENT for the past eight years with a clear preference for "trickle-down", tax breaks for the wealthy, little to no policy for the middle class, and debt for the unborn. We get it. Americans get it. This isn't a campaign problem, it's a governance problem. What is hurting John McCain so badly isn't just that he's more of the same, and not that Barack Obama is convincingly making the case that he is just that, more of the same. What is hurting John McCain is that a majority of American voters have decided that this approach is bullshit.
And when Americans decide that what you believe is bullshit, well, then you got problems not only as a candidate, but as a party - and for more than one election.