SEEKING A MIRACLE

Posted at 7:59 a.m. ET

We all read the polls, and, while it's entirely proper to be skeptical, the fact is that they all lean in the same direction.  This is not only true of national polls, but of polls in what were called "swing" states until the economic bomb went off.  Obama is solidly ahead, and on track to win an impressive, possibly even a landslide election two weeks from Tuesday.  He is likely to bring in large majorities in both the House and Senate.

That bunker in Australia is suddenly looking good, awfully good.

Can it be turned around?  Michael Barone cautiously suggests that it can, although he, like Karl Rove, makes it plain that he understands the statistical realities.

Can Joe Wurzelbacher, Joe the Plumber from Ohio, change the course of this campaign? That's one question that was raised at the third presidential debate. Wurzelbacher is the man who, in a moment caught on YouTube, confronts Barack Obama on his plan to raise taxes on people like him. Obama, sotto voce, replies that he wants to “spread the wealth around.” In the third consecutive week in which the headlines of the financial crisis have prompted both candidates to denounce “Wall Street greed,” the image of those whom Obama would tax higher was suddenly not an investment banker but a plumber

And, of course, the mainstream media immediately set out to destroy that image by incredible attacks on this small businessman.

The conventional wisdom going into the final debate was that the financial meltdown has pretty much finished off John McCain's campaign and has made an Obama victory inevitable. The polls — not just the national tracking polls but those in critical states — have supported this view unequivocally.

But there are two and a half weeks to go.

Both Obama and McCain have recently advanced additional economic planks to help hard-pressed, middle-class Americans. But neither can claim to have contributed much in the way of substance to the actual steps that Paulson and Bernanke — and, critically, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown — have taken to get credit circulating in the blood veins of the economy once again. The fact is that neither Obama nor McCain knows precisely what he would do upon taking office Jan. 20, and voters may sense that it is naive to expect they should.

Which might give way to a rethink just before election day.  No?

Democratic spin artists have dismissed McCain's attacks on Obama as distractions amid a possible economic disaster, and I suspect they will be proved right. Yet it remains the case that about half the voters have doubts about Obama.

About 45 percent of voters in a recent AP poll said they didn't think Obama is qualified to be president.

In three debates, the spin artists go on, Obama has shown that he more than meets the minimal standards for the office, as Ronald Reagan did in the single debate in 1980, and in a year like that one, in which most voters want the in party out, that will be enough. But the 1980 debate was on the Thursday before the election, and the decisive swing came over the weekend. Voters took almost every minute they could. Will they take more time this year, and give some thought to Joe the Plumber? 

It is possible, of course.  But Obama does have one advantage that Reagan also had, his personal attractiveness.  He simply comes off as an attractive candidate on television, even when he's not saying anything, which is most of the time.  McCain has not been able to turn the negative - his age - into a positive, stressing the wisdom that age and experience bring.  America is a youth-oriented society, and Obama is benefiting from the "image" thing.

There could be that sober second look that often comes in the last weekend.  But it can go toward Obama as well as McCain, especially if someone like Colin Powell endorses Obama on national-security grounds, helping to undercut McCain's best credential. 

But we can hope, and we can fight in these next two weeks.  If the gap can't be closed entirely, at least our side can, with get-out-the-vote efforts, make the final result as tight as possible, depriving the opposition of "blowout" talk and inflated egos. 

And political miracles do happen.  Just ask the descendants of Harry Truman.

October 18, 2008.