Ornstein travels back 28 years, draws elections parallels

    American Enterprise Institute Resident Scholar and CBS News analyst Norman Ornstein spoke in the Coolidge Room last night about the 2008 presidential election, a race that he said represents a "public desire for change" but is strikingly similar to the 1980 campaign.
  Ornstein began his talk, "An Election of Change: How Much, What Kind, What Consequences?" by outlining the current political landscape, which has seen Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama jolt ahead of Republican rival John McCain in the polls amid the recent economic downturn.
    Ornstein explained that with Americans' economic "safety net" having been torn apart by the financial collapse, voters now feel an even more urgent need to put the country back on track.
    "The public desire for change was vivid," he said. "This was an election of change. If, a year ago, we had been able to have a referendum allowing the country to TiVo through the coming year — just push that button and be done with the Bush administration, be done with the Congress, move on — I think it would have gotten a 98-percent vote to move on and get off to the next chapter in our lives and in our country's future."
    While the concept of "change" has become a rallying cry on both sides of the presidential race, Ornstein said the general election field is a blast from the past, so to speak, resembling the 1980 campaign in which then-Gov. Ronald Reagan (R-Calif.) ran against Democratic incumbent Jimmy Carter.
    "In 1980, we had another election of change, [with a] public that had had its fill of Jimmy Carter's presidency by the time we had moved into the final stretches of that campaign," he said.
    In the current race, the polls have remained strikingly stable since each major candidate chose his nominee, with the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) as Republican vice presidential nominee representing "one significant blip," Ornstein said. Sen. Obama (D-Ill.) has had about a three- or four-point lead in national polls since the Democratic National Convention at the end of August, according to Ornstein.
    The 1980 race featured similarly close polling numbers, Ornstein said.
    "And yet, with that enormous desire for change, and a president whose approval rating rivaled that of [President] George [W.] Bush -— down in the 20s — Ronald Reagan, the principle challenger, through July, August and September and into October in the Gallup Poll ranged between having a three-point lead to being down by a point because Americans looked at a challenger and saw an actor … that knew nothing about the world at a time when the world was a dangerous place."
    But after the only debate of that election, held on Oct. 28, Reagan finally convinced Americans he could lead — the same thing that is happening now, Ornstein said. The scholar called the recent spike in Obama's numbers, in which his Gallup Poll lead over Sen. McCain (R-Ariz.) has poked into the double digits, "predictable."
    During a brief question-and-answer session, Ornstein addressed the diverging campaign styles of Sen. Hillary Clinton (D-N.Y.), who he characterized as having a "George Steinbrenner approach" and Obama, who he said chose inexperienced people but put them in appropriate niches, delegating his subordinates into one the best-run campaigns in American history. "It has become very clear that McCain can't run much of anything," however, as he has run a top-down organization that has altered its message everyday, Ornstein said.
    This was the inaugural speech in the Frank C. Colcord Lecture series, which is sponsored by the political science department and the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Citizenship and Public Service.