can you provide proof of these claims because I saw a lot of coverage that said mccain should be taking advantage of his situation. the claim that the primary lasting was good for obama was that hilary was really testing all his negatives, the general public has a good idea of who obama is now before the republicans can really jump on his negaitves. how can it have been bad for mccain that hilary's campaign really tested obama's negatives during the entire time mccain got a free ride in the press. I'm not blaming you other than you're making no sense, other than just to say blah blah blah, you're spinning something for obama, blah blah blah. how original
honestly, I don't think they matter at this point. also, one of the more interesting things I saw over the weekend is that there does to be some limit on obama's poll numbers as far as how much of a lead he can get, but I don't remember the exact detail what they were saying
You don't remember the question "Does McCain clinch the nomination early give him a big advantage?" in the 200 different Obama/Hillary primary threads? Which was followed by a bunch of "The primary fight will keep Obama in the spot light" "Obama will win the primary anyway, this only give him more media coverage" "Any coverage is better than no coverage" "The negative stuff Hillary is doing is actually good for Obama since he can get them out of the way first". You either have a very short memory or is being disingenuous.
what is this question you speak of, there's an official question somewhere. i remember a bunch of people saying hilary should get out of the race, the democrats are screwing up as usual going negative in the primary, in otherwords, the opinion was varied at best. you'd be disingenuous at best to say you don't remember that but the simple fact is obama had a bunch of negatives coming out while mccain was clean by media standards
I don't think that's fair to insinuate that the GOP is counting on racism to win the election. McCain has never once made this campaign about that. Obama is the one who went there first(and often). The fact is though that neither the GOP nor the Dems can be assured that the poll numbers are an accurate reflection of how people will really vote. So a tied race could actually translate into a slight lead for McCain given the so-called Bradley effect. I don't agree with Trader Jorge that a bunch of stuff will be unleashed on Obama after the conventions. Sure, the massive TV ad campaigns will begin for both parties, but if there was any dirt on Obama it would've come out when Hillary was trying to get the nomination. What will happen is people will finally start to pay attention to what each candidate plans to do if elected. That's when the "hope" and "change" speeches will have to be set aside and Obama will have to start laying out his agenda.
You're not paying attention. What do you think the subtext is to all of those ads calling Obama “the one” or “the messiah” or “he’s a celebrity”? That’s code for “Obama’s an uppity negro that doesn’t know his place.” So to say that McCain hasn’t subconsciously interjected race is absurd.
This is outlandish and quite possibly ban-worthy. To make that suggestion in that circumstance is to say that any criticism of Obama is racist, which we know is untrue. Rasmussen polled on the topic and showed that Obama, not McCain, interjected race. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/pub...alf_53_see_obama_dollar_bill_comment_that_way Only 22% Say McCain Ad Racist, But Over Half (53%) See Obama Dollar-bill Comment That Way Sunday, August 03, 2008 Email to a FriendAdvertisement Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not. However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree. Both campaigns expressed a desire to move beyond the recent flap. On Saturday Obama backed off the racism charge and accused McCain's campaign of cynicism instead. He also rejected McCain's charge that the Democrat himself had brought race into the campaign with his dollar bill comment. Two months after Obama clinched the Democratic Presidential Nomination, the race for the White House remains amazingly close in the Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll. Not surprisingly, the McCain ad generates significantly different perceptions along racial and ethnic lines. Most African-American voters—58%--saw the McCain ad as racist. Just 18% of white voters and 14% of all other voters shared that view. To watch the ad, click HERE. As for Obama’s comment, 53% of white voters saw it as racist, as did 44% of African-Americans and 61% of all other voters. There were also significant partisan divides. Democrats were evenly divided as to whether the McCain commercial was racist, and they were also evenly divided on the Obama comment. Republicans, by an 87% to 4% margin, rejected the notion that the McCain campaign ad was racist. But, by a 67% to 26% margin, GOP voters believe that Obama’s comment was racist. Unaffiliated voters, by a five-to-one margin, said the McCain ad was not racist. By a much narrower 50% to 38% margin, unaffiliateds viewed Obama’s comment as racist. Overall, just 22% of voters believe that most Americans are racist. That view is shared by 32% of Democrats, 20% of unaffiliated voters and 12% of Republicans. African-American voters are evenly divided on the question.
David Gergen doesn't think so... "There has been a very intentional effort to paint him as somebody outside the mainstream, other, 'he's not one of us,'" said Gergen, who has worked with White Houses, both Republican and Democrat, from Nixon to Clinton. "I think the McCain campaign has been scrupulous about not directly saying it, but it's the subtext of this campaign. Everybody knows that. There are certain kinds of signals. As a native of the south, I can tell you, when you see this Charlton Heston ad, 'The One,' that's code for, 'he's uppity, he ought to stay in his place.' Everybody gets that who is from a southern background. We all understand that. When McCain comes out and starts talking about affirmative action, 'I'm against quotas,' we get what that's about." http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2008/08/03/gergen-mccain-is-using-co_n_116605.html
First off, you lose significant cred when you post HuffPo and expect to be taken seriously. Second, there is a MAMMOTH difference between being labeled 'uppity' and being labeled with the scurrilous nickname that you threw out there, which I won't even repeat. You should apologize to the board.
Barry Soetoro is Barak = Barry and then adding his stepfather's last name. He was once registered in school under his stepfather's name. Somewhat common. This is a re-dredging of the Obama is a Muslim smear. http://www.snopes.com/politics/obama/muslim.asp
david gergen, and you, are both idiots. i grew up in the south, born in houston, raised in swamp-east missouri, and school in Memphis, and i can tell you that no one in my background would see that ad and think "black." they would think "he's a pompous idiot who's much too full of himself."
Umm, *you* might want to starting paying attention to each candidate's plans. You might realize you know a lot less about McCain's plans than you do about Obama's - or at least you would, if you were actually interested in learning about them. Here's a little primer for you: http://dyn.politico.com/printstory.cfm?uuid=7A07C020-3048-5C12-008CE68AC1B89DB5 McCain's camp suffers from a paper gap While campaigns typically snow reporters with white papers and policy minutiae, many of the domestic policy plans of John McCain have been notably short on details. Analysts caution that both McCain and Barack Obama have produced policy pronouncements that are just as much election documents as workable proposals; after all, that is what presidential candidates do. But when it comes to the metric of paper produced, McCain trails Obama in spelling out the nitty-gritty. "The Obama people are much more detailed," said Robert Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, a bipartisan advocacy group dedicated to balancing the budget. Consider McCain campaign senior adviser Taylor Griffin’s description of his candidate's plan for fixing Social Security: "The history of the Social Security debate has taught that too many specifics, especially during a presidential campaign, has polarized the debate," he said of the program that McCain called "an absolute disgrace [that's] got to be fixed." Will he contrast his plan to that of his opponent? "Sen. McCain believes this is so important that we do not politicize this debate during an election season." What, then, is the plan? There doesn't appear to be a page dedicated to it on the McCain website, though some details can be gleaned from the page dedicated to his plan to balance the budget by 2013: "John McCain will fight to save the future of Social Security, and he believes that we may meet our obligations to the retirees of today and the future without raising taxes. John McCain supports supplementing the current Social Security system with personal accounts — but not as a substitute for addressing benefit promises that cannot be kept." Elsewhere, though, he's talked down private accounts, saying only that "workers ought to have the latitude to take a small amount of their own taxes, of their own money — it's not somebody else's money — and put it into an account with their name on it, a very small amount." And on an appearance last Sunday on "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," he told the host that "everything," specifically including Obama's tax hike, "is on the table." To be sure, Obama's Social Security plan has holes still to be filled, and the McCain camp has lately been charging the Democrat with changing the nuances of his plan to better suit his current political needs. The Obama campaign, which denies the charge while also saying the specifics would have to be worked out in conjunction with Congress, notes that it has a "specific strategy" — an inversion of the usual campaign dynamic in which the trailing candidate usually introduces policy plans first, and in more detail. "He has not offered very much in specifics that I have seen," Brian Riedl, a budget analyst at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said about McCain's Social Security plan. Riedl, however, was nonplussed by Obama's level of detail when it comes to spending programs. "Obama's website has page after page after page of very specific [entitlement] increases, specifically within Medicare. It doesn't take political courage to specify the goodies you're going to offer voters." "You can't judge campaign numbers the same way you'd judge a president's budget," said Bixby. But he added that the McCain campaign's budget proposals — including a promise to balance the budget by 2013 — were notably short on specifics and often didn't appear to add up. Even many of the economists listed on McCain's site endorsing his budget plan stressed they were agreeing more to the principles of lowering taxes and cutting federal spending than to the specifics, such as they were. "The McCain goal is quite responsible," said Bixby. "But I can't see any way he could get there under the policies they've been proposing. There's a disconnect there." A report issued last week by the Tax Policy Center, a well-respected, numbers-oriented think tank, found that "Sen. McCain's proposals on the stump are often far more sweeping than the more measured options outlined by his campaign" — and would in fact double the tax impact of his formal proposals, while Obama's off-the-cuff additions would reduce the impact of his plan by about one-sixth. Douglas Holtz-Eakin, McCain's economic adviser, disputed the analysis, saying that while McCain's words on the trail don't always jibe with the granular specifics, the Tax Policy Center drew trillion-dollar assumptions based on McCain saying things like he'd prefer to get rid of the alternative minimum tax. "He has been very clear that he'd like to develop an alternative simplified tax," Holtz-Eakin said, noting that he'd try to create one that would be revenue-neutral. "We do not yet have a specific proposal." The Obama campaign currently has 14 paid staffers (twice as many as in the primary), and The New York Times reported last week that his foreign policy campaign bureaucracy has some 300 advisers, 12 of whom joined the campaign for at least one leg of this week's world tour. The McCain campaign declined to say how many policy staffers it employs. but did concede that its rival's staff was bigger. "Maybe that's because they are on both sides of every policy," cracked McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds. The McCain campaign, which nearly ran out of money during the primaries and until New Hampshire seemed headed for a crash-landing, operated on a shoestring budget. At points it appeared that Holtz-Eakin was responsible for formulating (or at least defending) every policy the campaign put out. "The difference in enthusiasm among voters is also a difference in enthusiasm among policy wonks," said Robert Gordon, a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress who worked for the Clinton White House and John Kerry's campaign in 2004. For Obama, the need to generate policy — and snag policy wonks — has been pressing since early in the primary, when the campaign needed to prove both its policy prowess and an ability to sign up top-flight minds to compete with Hillary Rodham Clinton and John Edwards. "We were in a contentious primary that lasted a very, very long time and was hard-fought and very substantive," said Obama policy director Heather Higginbottom. "That did not happen in a Republican primary." In part because the leading Democrats' policy proposals were largely similar and the details were much considered by key constituencies, the candidates were compelled to offer fine-grained plans to draw differences. It made for debates in which Clinton keyed in on nuanced and sometimes difficult-to-explain differences between her plan and Obama's to vastly increase the federal government's role in providing health care. Intraparty pressures also meant that Obama produced a fairly ambitious climate change strategy last year. The McCain campaign did not start rolling out the details of its environment and energy plan until May of this year. The more dominant interest groups in the Republican Party — social conservatives, hawks and tax-cutters — had less wonky primary goals that didn't need extreme specificity to be articulated clearly, which was also true for women's groups on the left. When McCain has focused on domestic policy, it has generally been to offer headline-grabbing plans, such as his proposal for a gas tax holiday and his claim that allowing offshore drilling could have an immediate effect on gas prices, both of which were almost universally derided by economists across the ideological spectrum. "There's a lot more happening in the Obama budget. There's a lot more moving parts, and I think that probably calls for more specificity," Bixby said. "It's a much more ambitious agenda than McCain's." You may not like Obama's agenda, but it's far more detailed and specific than McCain - who talks about ... well... Obama's ideas.
Well you are a pompus, upper west side New York, Opera singing has-been so I really don't think the ads were directed at "someone with your background."
