Barack Obama Elected President!

[Southofnowhere]

Obama had to do this to get them to SHUTUP! Not that it will work!

[EricaKane70]

It would be hilarious if this was all just a distraction and hillary really is the vp.

[Jess]

It really would be!! :lol:

I don't know that it will do any harm if Obama's folks manage the convention well. I also think Hillary knows she has as much to lose as Obama if the convention tanks.

[Sylph]

Has anyone read Fran Rich's most recent op-ed?

August 17, 2008

Op-Ed Columnist

The Candidate We Still Don’t Know

By FRANK RICH

AS I went on vacation at the end of July, Barack Obama was leading John McCain by three to four percentage points in national polls. When I returned last week he still was. But lo and behold, a whole new plot twist had rolled off the bloviation assembly line in those intervening two weeks: Obama had lost the election!

The poor guy should be winning in a landslide against the despised party of Bush-Cheney, and he’s not. He should be passing the 50 percent mark in polls, and he’s not. He’s been done in by that ad with Britney and Paris and by a new international crisis that allows McCain to again flex his Manchurian Candidate military cred. Let the neocons identify a new battleground for igniting World War III, whether Baghdad or Tehran or Moscow, and McCain gets with the program as if Angela Lansbury has just dealt him the Queen of Hearts.

Obama has also been defeated by racism (again). He can’t connect and “close the deal” with ordinary Americans too doltish to comprehend a multicultural biography that includes what Cokie Roberts of ABC News has damned as the “foreign, exotic place” of Hawaii. As The Economist sums up the received wisdom, “lunch-pail Ohio Democrats” find Obama’s ideas of change “airy-fairy” and are all asking, “Who on earth is this guy?”

It seems almost churlish to look at some actual facts. No presidential candidate was breaking the 50 percent mark in mid-August polls in 2004 or 2000. Obama’s average lead of three to four points is marginally larger than both John Kerry’s and Al Gore’s leads then (each was winning by one point in Gallup surveys). Obama is also ahead of Ronald Reagan in mid-August 1980 (40 percent to Jimmy Carter’s 46). At Pollster.com, which aggregates polls and gauges the electoral count, Obama as of Friday stood at 284 electoral votes, McCain at 169. That means McCain could win all 85 electoral votes in current toss-up states and still lose the election.

Yet surely, we keep hearing, Obama should be running away with the thing. Even Michael Dukakis was beating the first George Bush by 17 percentage points in the summer of 1988. Of course, were Obama ahead by 17 points today, the same prognosticators now fussing over his narrow lead would be predicting that the arrogant and presumptuous Obama was destined to squander that landslide on vacation and tank just like his hapless predecessor.

The truth is we have no idea what will happen in November. But for the sake of argument, let’s posit that one thread of the Obama-is-doomed scenario is right: His lead should be huge in a year when the G.O.P. is in such disrepute that at least eight of the party’s own senatorial incumbents are skipping their own convention, the fail-safe way to avoid being caught near the Larry Craig Memorial Men’s Room at the Twin Cities airport.

So why isn’t Obama romping? The obvious answer — and both the excessively genteel Obama campaign and a too-compliant press bear responsibility for it — is that the public doesn’t know who on earth John McCain is. The most revealing poll this month by far is the Pew Research Center survey finding that 48 percent of Americans feel they’re “hearing too much” about Obama. Pew found that only 26 percent feel that way about McCain, and that nearly 4 in 10 Americans feel they hear too little about him. It’s past time for that pressing educational need to be met.

What is widely known is the skin-deep, out-of-date McCain image. As this fairy tale has it, the hero who survived the Hanoi Hilton has stood up as rebelliously in Washington as he did to his Vietnamese captors. He strenuously opposed the execution of the Iraq war; he slammed the president’s response to Katrina; he fought the “agents of intolerance” of the religious right; he crusaded against the G.O.P. House leader Tom DeLay, the criminal lobbyist Jack Abramoff and their coterie of influence-peddlers.

With the exception of McCain’s imprisonment in Vietnam, every aspect of this profile in courage is inaccurate or defunct.

McCain never called for Donald Rumsfeld to be fired and didn’t start criticizing the war plan until late August 2003, nearly four months after “Mission Accomplished.” By then the growing insurgency was undeniable. On the day Hurricane Katrina hit, McCain laughed it up with the oblivious president at a birthday photo-op in Arizona. McCain didn’t get to New Orleans for another six months and didn’t sharply express public criticism of the Bush response to the calamity until this April, when he traveled to the Gulf Coast in desperate search of election-year pageantry surrounding him with black extras.

McCain long ago embraced the right’s agents of intolerance, even spending months courting the Rev. John Hagee, whose fringe views about Roman Catholics and the Holocaust were known to anyone who can use the Internet. (Once the McCain campaign discovered YouTube, it ditched Hagee.) On Monday McCain is scheduled to appear at an Atlanta fund-raiser being promoted by Ralph Reed, who is not only the former aide de camp to one of the agents of intolerance McCain once vilified (Pat Robertson) but is also the former Abramoff acolyte showcased in McCain’s own Senate investigation of Indian casino lobbying.

Though the McCain campaign announced a new no-lobbyists policy three months after The Washington Post’s February report that lobbyists were “essentially running” the whole operation, the fact remains that McCain’s top officials and fund-raisers have past financial ties to nearly every domestic and foreign flashpoint, from Fannie Mae to Blackwater to Ahmad Chalabi to the government of Georgia. No sooner does McCain flip-flop on oil drilling than a bevy of Hess Oil family members and executives, not to mention a lowly Hess office manager and his wife, each give a maximum $28,500 to the Republican Party.

While reporters at The Post and The New York Times have been vetting McCain, many others give him a free pass. Their default cliché is to present him as the Old Faithful everyone already knows. They routinely salute his “independence,” his “maverick image” and his “renegade reputation” — as the hackneyed script was reiterated by Karl Rove in a Wall Street Journal op-ed column last week. At Talking Points Memo, the essential blog vigilantly pursuing the McCain revelations often ignored elsewhere, Josh Marshall accurately observes that the Republican candidate is “graded on a curve.”

Most Americans still don’t know, as Marshall writes, that on the campaign trail “McCain frequently forgets key elements of policies, gets countries’ names wrong, forgets things he’s said only hours or days before and is frequently just confused.” Most Americans still don’t know it is precisely for this reason that the McCain campaign has now shut down the press’s previously unfettered access to the candidate on the Straight Talk Express.

To appreciate the discrepancy in what we know about McCain and Obama, merely look at the coverage of the potential first ladies. We have heard too much indeed about Michelle Obama’s Princeton thesis, her pay raises at the University of Chicago hospital, her statement about being “proud” of her country and the false rumor of a video of her ranting about “whitey.” But we still haven’t been inside Cindy McCain’s tax returns, all her multiple homes or private plane. The Los Angeles Times reported in June that Hensley & Company, the enormous beer distributorship she controls, “lobbies regulatory agencies on alcohol issues that involve public health and safety,” in opposition to groups like Mothers Against Drunk Driving. The McCain campaign told The Times that Mrs. McCain’s future role in her beer empire won’t be revealed before the election.

Some of those who know McCain best — Republicans — are tougher on him than the press is. Rita Hauser, who was a Bush financial chairwoman in New York in 2000 and served on the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board in the administration’s first term, joined other players in the G.O.P. establishment in forming Republicans for Obama last week. Why? The leadership qualities she admires in Obama — temperament, sustained judgment, the ability to play well with others — are missing in McCain. “He doesn’t listen carefully to people and make reasoned judgments,” Hauser told me. “If John says ‘I’m going with so and so,’ you can’t count on that the next morning,” she complained, adding, “That’s not the man we want for president.”

McCain has even prompted alarms from the right’s own favorite hit man du jour: Jerome Corsi, who Swift-boated John Kerry as co-author of “Unfit to Command” in 2004 and who is trying to do the same to Obama in his newly minted best seller, “The Obama Nation.”

Corsi’s writings have been repeatedly promoted by Sean Hannity on Fox News; Corsi’s publisher, Mary Matalin, has praised her author’s “scholarship.” If Republican warriors like Hannity and Matalin think so highly of Corsi’s research into Obama, then perhaps we should take seriously Corsi’s scholarship about McCain. In recent articles at worldnetdaily.com, Corsi has claimed (among other charges) that the McCain campaign received “strong” financial support from a “group tied to Al Qaeda” and that “McCain’s personal fortune traces back to organized crime in Arizona.”

As everyone says, polls are meaningless in the summers of election years. Especially this year, when there’s one candidate whose real story has yet to be fully told.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/opinion/17rich.html?em

[Jess]

I do not think the polls mean a thing right now. I do not think, however, that the Obama campaign is doing a very good job. Neither is the McCain campaign, but Obama is not a known quantity.

I do not know who is going to win this campaign, but I really think Obama needs a message other than Change and Hope. A nice internet campaign was fine in the primary, but it's time now to start saying SPECIFICALLY what his plans are. He still can not articulate a message.

[Greg's GL]

I don't think they do either. One of the biggest problems with the polls is that they normally don't call cell phones, do they? Younger people generally are not getting traditional land lines, and opting for cell phones as their main phone number. I believe that Obama has struck a cord in younger people with a message of change and hope and they will turn out in droves for him. JMHO.

So the polls are inherently flawed because most of the these people are never questioned.

[George008]

I'm glad to see you as an Obama supporter acknowledge the fact that he has not specified what the "change" will be.

IA also that McCain is running as the conservative candidate and nothing more. He could also expand on his platform.

I dont agree with the article that McCain is the lessor known candidate. The American public has known John McCain as a US Senator for decades. You can take a look at his voting records, bills he has sponsored...etc..on the other hand..Obama has only been in the Senate for 3 years, 2 of which he has been running for president.

The polls never mean anything. Even the exit polls ON election day back in 2000 were wrong. Remember when all of the networks called Florida for Gore early on in the evening!

[Wales2004]

Obama does need to lay out specifics instead of getting caught in the back and forth. McCain needs to lay out specifics instead of initiating grade school antics. Change and hope aren't what needs to be specified and stand as is since it's obvious that if Obama is elected there will be a party change.

The problem with politics is that people on one side are always too busy looking for the flaws in their opponents instead of focusing on what it is they have to offer or at least hope to offer.

McCain isn't the lesser known candidate but he's still not really known either. He's hoping to make it off his status as a war hero and that does not necessarily translate into effective leadership. Nothing stands out from his senate service and it's hard to tell where he stands on certain issues since he seems to say what is expedient at the moment.

Neither candidate blows me away but no politician ever has anyway. McCain's childishness is extremely disappointing. I can't imagine my grandfather looking to take on such an important role and running his campaign like a toddler. I'm not seeing any wisdom in him at all. It's also not a good thing that he didn't want to give a sensible answer as to the dollar amount that puts a person in the rich category. I'm sure he had to be kidding when he said $5 million but how hard was it to be honest. Now if that was an honest answer then he's clearly out of touch with the majority of the people he seeks to represent/lead. He also needs to stop acting as if Obama seeking to be president is something greedy and treacherous since he's obviously a candidate himself and certainly not because his heart aches for the masses.

[Jess]

I think there are three big problems with polling in this campaign and all three of them cause problems for understanding exactly how Obama stands.

One is the cell phone issue. Many more people of all ages are cell-phone only now and those are difficult to survey.

Two surveys traditionally tap into people who have been registered or voted in previous elections. They do not tap into new voters

Three is the concept of social acceptability or the Bradley Effect. White people often do not tell the truth about whether they can support a black candidate. They don't answer surveys. This effect has showed itself when black candidates underperform on election day in regard to pre-election surveys. In this election, there are some signs that anglos are refusing to participate in surveys. Response rates are lower than usual. That could signal the Bradley effect or could merely be survey fatigue.

The only way any of this could lead to misleading poll results is if the people who are surveyed are "different" than the group that is not surveyed. For instance if cell-phone only users somehow were different than those with land lines then polls would be biased and not reflect a true cross-section of opinion.

The same could be said of the second and third categories. If new voters are different than those who previously were registered, the same bias would exist. For instance is there was a substantial influx of voters and those voters disproportionately inclined toward one candidate or another than polls would be biased.

If people refusing to answer polls were somehow different than those answering then, again poll results would be biased. If there is a Bradley effect for instance, polls would not reflect people who refuse to vote for Obama because he is black.

A totally off-topic comment: That is the only way that the Neison ratings could be flawed is if somehow individuals who watch soaps are in someway fundamentally non-representative of the public as a whole and thus not being picked up in the Neison sample. Perhaps that is where same day versus seven-day DVR could effect actual numbers of viewers or where group viewership could have some effect.

[Southofnowhere]

It seems like a lock that Evan Bayh will be Obama's running mate!

Bad move IMO!

[Jess]

Really!!! All week people have been talking about Biden. I believe I better go read the paper.

[George008]

I've heard a big rumble of Hillary lately. That's what they have been saying on ATL radio. They say sources tell them thats its been in the work for weeks.

[Roman]

I haven't heard one word about HRC here.

It's all Biden.

[Jess]

I have not heard much about Hillary lately so it is interesting that you are hearing that. I do not think she will be ruled out until the announcement is made of the actual choice.

All my Republican friends seem to think McCain will pick Lieberman. Do you think that will happen?

All I have heard this week is Biden because of his foreign policy experience. I heard Bayh was no longer under consideration. both candidates are really stirring speculation.

[George008]

No. I don't think he would pick Lieberman. That would cause to much of a disruption to the GOP. His conservatism is already in question. I think Lieberman would be way too risky.