WASHINGTON — For Barack Obama, it's been a lousy August.
The Illinois senator returned this week from vacation in Hawaii to discover that, while he was body surfing, Republican opponent John McCain was stealing a march on the race for the White House.
The Arizona senator exploited Russia's invasion of Georgia, concerns over rising fuel prices and his opponent's absence to take the lead in the presidential contest, according to a Reuters/Zogby poll released yesterday.
The poll, which had Mr. Obama ahead of Mr. McCain by seven points in July, now has him trailing by five, 41 per cent to Mr. McCain's 46 per cent.
More ominously for Mr. Obama, Mr. McCain now holds a nine-point lead, 49 per cent to 40 per cent, on the all-important question of which candidate could best manage the troubled U.S. economy.
“It's not what [Mr. Obama] expected, going into his convention five points down,” Mr. Zogby said. “And it puts additional pressure on him to make a good choice” for vice-president, “and then to define himself and McCain with a rousing speech” at that convention, which begins Monday.
Basically, it's been all downhill since Berlin. Mr. Obama's overseas tour, which culminated in a rally attended by 200,000 ecstatic supporters in Germany, left Mr. Obama comfortably ahead of Mr. McCain, who was in the midst of reorganizing his campaign team.
That new team is now led by Steve Schmidt, a protégé of Karl Rove, George W. Bush's election-strategy guru. They set to work sharpening Mr. McCain's message, and sharpening their attacks on Mr. Obama.
They portrayed their Democratic opponent as an elitist celebrity, out of touch with the concerns of the working Joe and Jill.
The Republicans derided Mr. Obama's resistance to increasing offshore drilling, even as oil and gasoline prices sent American drivers into shock.
Mr. McCain used the unfolding Georgia imbroglio to emphasize his deep background in foreign policy and his tough anti-Russian stand. (He wants the country kicked out of the G8.) And on Saturday, when both candidates appeared sequentially for a question-and-answer session with mega-evangelist Rick Warren, most observers thought Mr. McCain's responses were strong and clear, while Mr. Obama committed the unforgivable political sin of attempting nuance.
The results, for the Republicans, have been gratifying. Other pollsters haven't reported a reverse as dramatic as Mr. Zogby's, but all see the race tightening.
A Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll, released earlier this week, has Mr. Obama two points ahead, 45 per cent to 43 per cent. But that's within the poll's margin of error, and a far cry from the 12-point lead Mr. Obama enjoyed in that poll in June.
And Mr. McCain is now leading, although often by the narrowest of margins, in several key battleground states, including, Ohio, Virginia, Florida, Indiana and Colorado.
Mr. Obama, in response, has been ratcheting up his attacks on Mr. McCain. The campaign has been surreptitiously introducing attack ads into battleground states without alerting the media, the strategy being to earn a day or two of uncontested airtime before the Republicans learn of them and counter with ads of their own.
That's how closely each side is monitoring and responding to the other in this hair-trigger election. As Mr. Zogby observes, August has often been a bad month for Democrats. It was in August, 1988, that the Republicans successfully launched the Willie Horton campaign that suggested Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis was soft on crime.
In August, 2004, the Bush Republicans swift-boated John Kerry, torpedoing his war-hero narrative.
This election, the Democrats are determined not to let the Republicans bring down Mr. Obama's brand. As the polls narrow, Mr. Obama has been countering aggressively, campaigning on economic issues even as he released a tough new ad accusing Mr. McCain of neglecting the needs of working families.
Another ad, to air today in Atlanta, exploits Mr. McCain's very tenuous connection with Ralph Reed, a disgraced fundraiser who invited himself to a McCain event before being uninvited by event organizers.
The Obama camp has been pushing the limits in its efforts to link Mr. McCain with Mr. Reed.
“For 26 years in Washington, John McCain's played the same old games,” the narrator accuses in the Obama ad. “We just can't afford more of the same.”
What all observers are wondering is how the never-before-heard-of convention schedule will influence the contest. Traditionally the conventions have been held earlier in the summer, and a couple of weeks apart. Now they're back-to-back at the end of August and beginning of September. And neither candidate has announced his choice of vice-president, though Mr. Obama is expected to reveal his any hour now.
After the two conventions, the polls are expected to shift in favour of one of the two candidates, as voters assess which message resonated with their own values. Those polls may or may not shift again after the three presidential debates. (The first is on Sept. 26 and the last on Oct. 15.) So there is plenty of time for the Democrats to reverse their August slump. Nonetheless, for Mr. Obama, it must seem like forever since they loved him in Berlin.
