Stone Age Minds

Recent polls show Obama slipping versus McCain. How can that be when we can all see how much smarter and better Obama is? The answer might be in the instincts that we inherited from our stone age ancestors.

When men choose a president, at least some part of our thinking is probably those stone age instincts we used in selecting the leader of the war party. Women probably didn’t do much of the stone age war, so they might have some other kind of default hardware—mate choosing, for example. It’s entire plausible that the criteria that served for those stone age war leaders was are less than perfectly applicable to modern circumstances, but aspiring politicos need to keep those old instincts in mind.

What did you want in your SA war guy? Courage, leadership, trustworthiness, initiative, pugnacity, vigor, celerity in judgment and action, decisiveness, and good judgment. Conversely, you didn’t want cowardice, meekness, passivity, lassitude, vacillation, or bad judgment. Looking at the list it’s easy to see places where McCain scores well. Obama is a listener and a consensus builder, and these can be mistaken for lack of initiative, leadership, and decisiveness. Similarly his thoughtfulness and nuance.

When McCain attacks his patriotism and Obama responds by complaining about it and praising McCain’s patriotism he looks weak and passive. If Obama wants to be president, he is going to need to project strength, decisiveness and leadership. Simultaneously, he will need to deploy some pugnacity in attacking McCain’s weaknesses. It’s a fallacy to try to run on abstract issues. The number one issue in a presidential campaign is always the character and judgment of the candidates.

McCain’s physical courage is unassailable, but his lack of moral courage in kowtowing to Bush and the wing nuts is an invitation to attack. And how can you trust a guy who changes his principles on everything from offshore drilling to torture every time Rush Limbaugh says “boo.” He is an old man, and he has trouble keeping track of what he is talking about—Obama needs to go after that like our survival and our children’s survival depends on it, because it does.

Talk to our better natures, yes. But don’t forget that stone age warrior/hunter inside.

(Cross posted to a Daily Kos Diary)

UPDATE: More ammo from Joe Klein and Greg Sargent at TPM Election Central:

Yesterday I noted that Joe Klein had sat in on a focus group of 21 undecided voters and had discovered that character questions were way more important than issues in determining their presidential pick.

It turns out the focus group also tested responses to the "celeb" ad. I emailed Klein to ask him for details on what it showed, and he got back to me with a really interesting response.

For these voters, at least, it was unclear whether the comparison to Paris and Britney was working -- but the focus group did show that the "celeb" hit is effective in setting up the negative message that followed.

"it was fascinating and really depressing," Klein emailed. "The images of Paris and Britney came up too quickly for people to really respond on their dials, but the rally in Berlin set them rolling and it prepped them for the negative message in the last 10 seconds of the ad -- I think it was about drilling."

"So the `celebrity' ad wasn't about the celebrities, it was about the Berlin rally and gas prices," Klein says.

Interestingly, Obama's chief response ad didn't test anywhere near as well as the "celeb" ad itself, Klein says: "Since the focus groupers hadn't really picked up on Paris/Britney, they had no idea what Obama was actually responding to."

So for this handful of voters, at least, in the ads the "celeb" sneer is functioning as a softening up mechanism for the punch that follows. That's probably how the McCain team views the race more broadly, too: The celeb campaign is all about a long-term softening of Obama in advance of the ratcheted-up negative campaign that's coming this fall.

I have no idea whether it will work, but this strikes me as an interesting way of thinking about the McCain team's primary attack line.