US Politics / Chicken Dinner / 31 July 2008 / 1

Barack Obama has been wowing the crowds across Europe, but it's having little impact on the polls back home. Our friends at ChickenDinner explain why the strong favourite shouldn't lose heart at his inability to extend his lead.

More big brains have been focussing their energy this week on the riddle of why the gap in the polls between Obama and McCain isn't wider. As measured by the Real Clear Politics average of polls, that gap stood at just 2.5% on July 30, in spite of Obama riding an international wave of glowing headlines, while McCain has seemingly spent the last two weeks perched on his grumpy little toadstool, scowling at everything that approached.

Michael Tomasky, editor of the Guardian America, explains it thus: "It's late July. The Olympics are coming, and then after that the Democratic and Republican conventions. The campaign begins in earnest after that, in early September. Your average American voter is someone who votes only in presidential elections, and pays attention only from mid-September to early November.

"This voter undoubtedly knows that Obama just took a big trip, will have seen the images, and may even be able to name one substantive thing that happened during the trip. But this voter still doesn't know that much about Obama. She or he is going to have to spend a lot of timing watching him over the course of the Autumn and thinking about whether to put him in the White House, in much the same way as she or he is going to watch John McCain to see if he's the old, familiar McCain who was independent-minded and went his own way or if he's this new, shrunken McCain who never met a right-wing orthodoxy he couldn't embrace.

"This explains why the race remains close, at four or five or six points. People are still getting to know Obama and they're still trying to get their heads around the new and unimproved McCain. So they're going to watch the conventions and the debates (the last is on October 15) and the candidate's responses to events, and they're probably going to hang fire for some time while they do so."

Excellently put, sir, and a terrific reminder to keep this whole gaudy carnival in perspective. Yes, the outcome will profoundly affect the course the planet takes over the next four years, but the people who will be deciding that outcome have got bigger things to worry about right now. Like the athletics.

The message to those punters who have been swept along by Obama's recent headline-grabbing world tour has to be to get their feet back on the ground quickly. Just because 200,000 giddy Germans came out to hear him orate like a Kennedy doesn't mean the American voting public is any more or less likely to give him their endorsement. It is going to take a lot more than an early morning prayer for the cameras at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall to overcome the suspicion in which he is held by many Jewish voters. His stroll around the Downing Street garden with a beleaguered Gordon Brown probably failed to convert a single undecided voter, all of which goes to show that glorious press should not be confused with unconditional support.

For all the press's ability to cover every aspect of a candidate's character, campaign, history, body language and childhood, it still has an enormous and significant blind spot- the press is unable to accurately measure its own importance. As Steven Stark writes in the Boston Phoenix, "The press seems to be under the assumption that, because it knows so much about McCain, the electorate does too." So for those seeking an explanation as to why a vigorous and resplendent Obama cannot shake off a grumpy old man, just remember that unless one of them suddenly enters the Olympic hundred metres, the great American voting public is just not too bothered about either of them right now.

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1. apal | 31 July 2008

   I was there in Berlin -the Germans were not giddy just throughly bored.

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