Rupert Cornwell: McCain is swimming against the tide

"I don't mind a good fight," John McCain told the Republican faithful last week, "and for reasons known only to God I've had quite a few tough ones in my life." But even for this former prisoner of war in North Vietnam turned battle-seasoned Senator often at odds with his own party, no fight will be as tough as the one he faces over the next eight weeks, if he is to defy every law of politics and win the White House.

Right now, you might not think so. After all, the Republican convention in St Paul was at least as sucessful as the Democrats' gathering in Denver. In terms of TV audience, it even bested the Democrats, as the speeches of McCain and Sarah Palin, his vice-presidential nominee and America's latest celebrity sensation, both attracted more than 40 million viewers. And who said Americans don't care about politics? More people watched the climaxes of both conventions than tuned in for the Oscars, the Olympics opening ceremony, or even the latest edition of American Idol.

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Nor is McCain significantly behind in the race itself as it enters the final sprint to election day on 4 November. Whatever "bounce" Barack Obama took from Denver seems to have been cancelled out by St Paul. Basically, we're back to where we were a fortnight ago. The Democrats, now as then, are way ahead when it comes to broad party "generic" vote, but Obama seems unable to cash in this advantage.

In the latest national tracking polls (which do not fully reflect the impact of McCain's acceptance speech), he leads by between 2 and 4 per cent. But as Al Gore can confirm, it's not the national popular vote that decides American elections, but the results in specific swing states. In Gore's case, of course, the state was Florida. This time there's a dozen of them, where local polls show the candidates effectively tied.

Obama and McCain were campaigning in these states when they went to their conventions, and went straight back to them when the conventions were over. The keys to election 2008 can be judged from the candidates' schedules. Along with his running mate, Joe Biden, Obama was in Pennsylvania and Ohio on Friday, and campaigned in Indiana yesterday. McCain and Palin went straight from St Paul to Wisconsin, before spending yesterday in Colorado and New Mexico, two western states narrowly carried by George W Bush in 2004, but toss-ups this time around.

But if the numbers haven't budged, neither have the underlying realities of this election year. Sarah Palin has made waves – first with her colourful family history, then with her slashing attacks on Obama from the podium, and now with a controvery over the talkshow host Oprah Winfrey, whose support helped to put Obama on the map and who apparently is refusing to have the Alaska Governor as a guest. But the tide still flows powerfully the Democrats' way.

For McCain, the next best thing about the convention after Palin was that Hurricane Gustav kept the unloved President Bush away from proceedings. In his speech, the candidate did not once mention the incumbent Republican President by name. To keep the White House in the hands of his party, he must run at arm's length from it. This makes for a gripping political narrative. But it's hardly a recipe for victory.

Everything else conspires against him, even the trumpeted success of the surge in Iraq, which McCain long supported. The mess in Iraq was the key issue in the Democratic mid-term triumph in 2006. This time Iraq is barely mentioned. Americans now have the general impression they're at last winning the war – which makes them less reluctant to entrust its conduct to an untried Democrat.

To win, McCain must keep things personal. If he manages to define the election as a choice between two men, between an iconoclastic war hero and a first-term Senator with a most unfamiliar background, voters may well choose him.

But even that is not certain. McCain makes sense as an American Churchill or De Gaulle, someone summoned by his country to confront a life-or-death national emergency. The challenge facing the US today, however, is different. People yearn for change; an unprecedented 80 per cent of the population say their nation is on the wrong track. A conservative era is drawing to a close. Americans are moving to the left, telling pollsters they want a more activist government.

In the weeks ahead even Sarah Palin will probably be a sideshow. She may have galvanised a Republican base that has never greatly trusted John McCain. But presidential elections are about choosing a president, not a vice-president.

Yes, McCain has a certain Churchillian appeal with his reputation for defying party orthodoxy. But no one ever identified the old British bulldog with a zest for social change and innovative economic thinking. Back in 1992, amid a recession far less painful than the one facing the US now, Bill Clinton defeated the first President Bush by sticking to the message of "It's the economy, stupid", pinned up in his campaign war room in Little Rock, Arkansas. In 2008, that strategy is doubly true.

Barring a massive foreign crisis, this election will be about domestic pocket-book issues: jobs, wages and health coverage, how to pay for one's children at college, how to hang on to one's home. The most significant event of the last fortnight was Friday's government report showing that unemployment in August jumped to 6.1 per cent, its highest level in five years, with every prospect of worse to come. On all these issues, Democrats have a huge advantage. Bush is not to blame for America's economic woes (though Alan Green-span's policies at the Federal Reserve might well be). But the President and his party are being blamed nonetheless. If Obama can tie McCain to Bush, and keep the focus on the country's problems and what must be done to fix them, it is hard to see how he can lose.

McCain's best chance of what the pundits call a "game-changer" lies not in Palin, but in his debates with Obama – above all in the first and most important of them, on 26 September at the University of Mississippi. The subject will be domestic policy – in other words, the economy.

The initial debate is the first opportunity for voters to see the candidates square off, and often has a vital bearing on the final result. In 2000, for instance, Bush proved he could more or less hold his own with Gore, who came across as disparaging and over-scornful of his opponent. Given the topic, Obama will be expected to score a clear win this time. But if he does not, if he fails to make the economic case for the Democrats, or McCain somehow shifts the argument from issues to personalities, all bets are off.

But it will be a tall order. Here, as everywhere, the old truism of elections applies: oppositions don't win elections, governments lose them. And Bush and the Republicans have done more than enough to lose this one – whatever the efforts of the indomitable fighter John McCain.

For rolling comment on the US election visit: independent.co.uk/campaign08

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