I'd meant to post the link. Sorry bout that. Here it is. http://www.newsweek.com/id/140461 My point isn't that those two issues will be responsible for a landslide, only that they'll be responsible for things being marginally better for Obama and worse for McCain than they are right now at a time when things are already better for Obama than they are for McCain. My reasoning for a landslide is in my previous post. And I'm still waiting for somebody to make an argument for McCain gaining on Obama that isn't totally vague (inertia, it's always close, he'll get a convention bounce). The reasons listed so far have very little to do with McCain taking any proactive steps and instead seem to rely on things evening out for him magically.
I keep having the feeling McCain is just a sacrificial lamb. Someone not too offensive....and a safe looking place to park you vote if you do not want to vote for Obama or the Democrats. It's Obama's to lose. If he can keep his message simple (a la Clinton 1992) he should sweep. He needs to avoid getting into choice/life debates or allowing other 'hook' issues from taking away from his main message and giving people a reason to vote against him.
Good post. Somebody said on TV yesterday (I can't remember who) that there is one candidate in this race: Obama. If people trust him and can imagine him as president he'll win in a landslide; if they don't or can't, he'll lose in one.
Another thing I'd like to point out that I haven't already is that Bob Barr provides a "safe place to park" (to borrow from bnb) for Republicans that don't like McCain but can't vote Obama or Democrat. And, in fact, Tom Delay's wife said yesterday she would vote Barr because she couldn't get behind McCain. It's hard to see Dems doing that with Nader after the last two elections. For the first time since Perot, third party candidates seem to favor Dems this year too.
Every time I finish one post I remember more bad news for McCain. He's relying on the bitter primary battle to provide him some much needed help among women. He won't get it. In addition to the important abortion/SC issue, he laughed when asked "How do we beat the b****?" and said, "Good question." He allegedly called Cindy a **** and a trollop. And he left his badly injured first wife to go off and marry a rich young thing. None of this is in wide circulation now, though it's all a matter of record (excepting calling Cindy names, which is hearsay), but all of it will hurt him with women.
The degree to which this is happening has gone almost unnoticed by conservatives. This despite HUGE amounts of borrowed money spent on the defense. How anyone can know anything about the current state of the military and argue for saying in Iraq is beyond me.
McCain can easily win. I hate to say it, but the tail end of the Democratic Party showed that there are still enough white racists in the to tilt the election. I'm not talking about racist Republicans. They would not have voted for Obama even if he was white. And as unappealing as McCain is for some of the rednecks, the hate for Obama might be enough to counteract it and still send them to the polls. Racist Democrats and Independents are the key factor. In those "swing" states such as Ohio, Florida, Indiana, Michigan, Colorado, etc. - there are probably enough (even 1 percent might be enough) of these racist Dems and Independents to swing the election for McCain.
This is one of those conventional wisdom things that too easily get repeated because it makes sense on a gut level. However, among voters who would have still voted had Perot not been in the race, the total would have been split just about evenly (About 1% more would have voted for Clinton). Clinton's lead over Bush stays approximately the same before Perot leaves the race, during the time he is out, and after he gets back in. With or without Perot voters, Clinton would have won the electoral majority, but it could easily be argued that Perot was more damaging to Clinton because the votes he drew kept Clinton from getting over 50%. http://bbs.clutchfans.net/showpost.php?p=3679305&postcount=34
That is very interesting. What I would be interested to know is where those votes are situated. This will come down to the electoral college. It may be another case where the winner in popular vote does not win the White House.
Here's an interesting analysis on this: http://www.fivethirtyeight.com/2008/06/how-electoral-college-hurts-gop.html Normally, we think of it from the perspective of one candidate winning states big and the other winning them small, but they looked at it from the view of population changes. Lots of Republican-leaning states have grown this decade, but don't have any more electoral votes yet. So from that perspective, his estimate is that it's slightly more likely that McCain ends up in a situation of winning a popular vote but losing the electoral college.
A plan to actually reduce gas to below $2.00 per gallon, reduce natural gas and electricity rates, and at the same time promote and develop "green" technology at all levels including cars and ac units. Whoever could do that and throw in universal health care has my vote.
Me too! Just having fun! I've been swamped at work and out of town the last weekend so I haven't been able to keep up. But I see Bats has been on fire! But, like the graph just posted, I'd be surprised if Obama's lead doesn't stay in the 5 to 10% range until the election.
I wanted to thank you for your response. I don't agree with it, but thanks anyway! Yes, Bush has made a mess of Iraq, but how does staying there indefinitely help the United States? We don't have a draft, thank goodness, and one of the trade-offs is a much smaller, but far more potent, military. It's simply not designed for occupying large countries for years on end. There aren't enough people in it to make that practical, even if you wanted to. Bush dithered around after making the huge mistake of invading and occupying Iraq. He could have pushed through an expansion of the size of the Army and Marines, something many Democrats, ironically, were calling for. Bush didn't want to do that because he is simply the poster child for the Peter Principal. Bush long ago got himself promoted to a job far beyond his abilties... President of the United States. We could be well on our way to expanding our ground forces, but he wasn't interested. George Bush apparently lives in an alternate reality where facts don't matter and if you surround yourself with enough yes men and women, they will tell you what they think you want to hear. So we can't stay "forever" in Iraq, unless we want to keep a huge percentage of our ground forces there, while hoping that we get lucky and we don't need them anywhere else. A Great Power, or any power, for that matter, can never assume there won't be a threat from another quarter that might require a big response. Tied down in Iraq, we can't effectively respond to a major crisis somewhere else that requires large numbers of ground forces. We just don't have them. Our Navy and Air Force can defeat pretty much any combination of powers one could imagine... in the air and on, below, or above the sea. On the ground? Our military brass are quietly freaking out that our best ground pounders are parked in Iraq and Afghanistan. Mostly in Iraq. You mentioned my point about confronting dictators around the world, but I don't think you "got it." We can't overthrow every mad or semi-mad dictator there is on this screwed up planet. I wasn't saying we should. In fact, as idealistic as it might sound to say we should, the truth is that we can't do it. We don't have the people, we don't have the money, and thus it is not in our interest to run around overthrowing every tin-pot dictator, even if we have the desire. George Bush ran in 2000 hammering Gore for being part of the Clinton Administration when it intervened in the Balkans, in Europe, in the backyard of our most important allies. That was an intervention in a tiny country in SE Europe and Bush carried on about the US not becoming "the world's policeman." Sure, Bush didn't see 9/11 coming. I won't blame him for that (although some might). I also think the war in Afghanistan was one of the singular successes of his administration. Afghanistan is where you should be focusing. After Afghanistan, Bush lost whatever "focus" he had regarding foreign policy. I don't know why you said this... "Bush screwed up big time. I'm hoping McCain will not. Remember, Bush is finishing his second term trial free, while Clinton was put on trial for getting blowjobs from an intern." What does President Clinton and an intern have to do with Bush invading and occupying a sovereign nation, hunting down its leader, and signing off on hanging a head of state? Frankly, it's stunning to me that someone would even put that into a conversation about Bush and foreign policy. Clinton fooling around with a young woman would never have come to light had the GOP not spent tens of millions of dollars trying to find something, anything, to assault Bill Clinton and his wife with. So they found out about that. So what? Eisenhower had an affair in Europe during WWII. FDR had affairs. Jack Kennedy chased anything in a skirt. The press knew about all three. You know what? They didn't think the private affairs of a President were anything the public should know about. It was their private life, not their public life. Unless the two intersected, it wasn't "news fit to print." You mentioned some anecdotal stories about "Vietnamese communists." I happen to enjoy telling anecdotes myself. Sadly, no one around here seems to be interested much, unless they agree with whatever point I'm making using those stories. If you can't find it on Google, then it isn't "real." I believe you heard those stories and I certainly won't call you out for doing it. However, the war in Vietnam was huge, involving millions of people. We rotated well over a million of our people into Vietnam, and the Vietnamese, of course, were involved up to their necks in it, on both sides. I'm sure there were some on the Red side who thought they were getting pounded and were on the verge of losing. My guess would be that they were the Vietcong, not the NVA (North Vietnamese Army). Tet pretty much wiped out the VC. It didn't matter. Why? Because the leaders of North Vietnam considered them expendable. They never thought they were losing. In fact, they were very confident in victory. After all, they defeated a major European power just a few years before, who had been ruling much of Southeast Asia as a colony for a very long time and had many with a vested interest in the French remaining. Didn't matter. They lost and 75,000 French soldiers lost their lives, more than we lost in Vietnam. Really, you posted so much that I disagree with (even if I enjoyed reading it), that I'm probably crazy spending as much time replying as I am. There's too much! "About the Iraq War, even though you think it's inappropriate, Bush still got what he wanted and got allies too. He claimed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. If this country protested like they did back in the 70's, then the consequences could have been alot less than now. Obviously more people agreed to the invasion of Iraq. And yet Bush was elected again. Amazing." Look, with all due respect, to say Bush had allies for his Iraq adventure is insulting to his father, who actually did have allies for the Gulf War. Except for the British, the numbers of allied troops in Iraq has been tiny. By contrast, in Vietnam, Australia put 47,000 troops into the theatre. South Korea rotated over 300,000 troops into Vietnam during the war. Over 5,000 were killed, more than the number of Americans lost in Iraq. The Philippines put over 10,000 into the theatre. There simply isn't any remote comparison to Bush's "allies" deployed into Iraq. Check your facts. Except for the British, the US has pretty much gone it alone, with the other help worth mentioning coming from "non-traditional" allies, like Poland. Thanks to Bush's inept foreign policy, which pissed off the vast majority of our allies. So much so that they passed when it came to getting involved in the quagmire. And the comment "If this country protested like they did back in the 70's, then the consequences could have been alot less than now. Obviously more people agreed to the invasion of Iraq" (!!!) Hey, I was one of those protesters, and I recall raising more hell in the late '60's than in the 1970's, but what do I know? As for "Obviously more people agreed to the invasion of Iraq," the American people, in my opinion, were lied to by the Bush Administration. You may have noticed that they've figured that out. Check out some polls on the subject, if you like. I could go on, but I'll give everyone, especially me , a break. Again, you really need to read up on this stuff. In my opinion, of course. Impeach Bush.
If Obama's lead stays closer to 5% than 10%, the election will be extremely close. I predict a close election because you have two men running who seem to be good guys.
