Letters to the Editor
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Cakewalk for Obama?
Obama won the nomination because he and his people outsmarted and outworked Clinton.
It seems unlikely that they'd suddenly decide to coast. But hey, if you're a Republican, it's pretty to think so, isn't it?
(apologies to Hemingway)
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this is a very cautious analysis
I guess I am not sure that a lot of these are even swing states. Michigan won't be close. Oregon won't be close. NJ won't be close. this is basically an analysis that's not taking into account how bad the situation is for Republicans as a whole- even if the media and most voters are still convinced that McCain is a "maverick". Obama has been on the defensive for months and still is even with Mccain in national polls. I think that he probably won't win FLA- but has an excellent chance with almost every other state mentioned....I think that he will get to 300 and maybe even 322. why wouldn't he win Iowa (again)?? for example. Ohio is a state that has been getting hammered by the Bush economy and where the Democrats are now in power. let's remember also that the Bush won there in 2004 basically by stealing it. the secretary of state was his campaign manager!sound familiar. Obama is a much stronger candidate than John Kerry, and so given the national mood it's hard to see how he loses ANY state that Kerry won. NH is just that much more filled with Boston professionals, etc.
Dems needs to learn to be aggressive and optimistic instead of waiting for the Republican machine to go into effect. Luckily Obama and Axelrod already got the message. and no, Strickland should not be the VP...somebody with Nat. Security credentials is the answer.
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New voters limit the value of any backwards-looking analysis
Any analysis on how to get to 270 in 2008 is fatally flawed if it extrapolates from long-term trends in state-by-state voting patterns. Doesn't matter how thoughtful the analysis is made, or how well it is presented.
Why?
Because voter turnout is an unaccounted variable.
Look at the hundreds of thousands of new voters or converted voters who have registered Democrat during this primary season. It wasn't all due to Rush, or because the Republican race was decided relatively early. Look at the youth vote that has come out for Obama. It has made a difference already.
Evidence? Iowa. Clinton got all of the voters that Mark Penn told her she'd need to win. The problem was that Penn and most everyone else didn't count on all of the new voters that Obama brought into the process. They said that these new voters wouldn't show up in the caucus meetings. Well they did, and then some. The rest is history.
And what are the issues that are going to compel the occasional voter to make it to the polls this year? The economy, and the war. Both are winning issues for any Democrat.
Voter turnout will be the highest ever. McCain will get more votes than Bush did in either 2000 or 2004. And he's still lose overwhelmingly.
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blah blah blah Obama Can't Win blah blah blah...
No, that's not what I believe.
It's just one aspect the standard, tiresome Republican propaganda attack.
It's the same every election. Every Democrat candidate "can't win" or "isn't electable" for one reason or another. If you believe "pundits".
Gore was "unelectable" but won the popular vote. Kerry was "unelectable" but Bush won by the worst margin of any re-elected incumbent.
Xanthro, Shawn, and the others are just kids playing pundit, copying what they see the Republican propagandists do on TeeVee. They want to grow up to be shouting heads.
Well, let's be fair. It's not just that. It's the desperate fear and denial, too. Their reptile brains will explode if a "liberal" black man is elected president. My advice - don't stand too close to their heads in November.
Obama is ahead of McCain by any measure, at this point. McCain has a solid chance, unless he makes a mistake. But he's clearly behind.
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With...
... these factors:
~Gas inching towards over 4$@gallon, maybe $5@gallon.
~Price of Food staples increasing
~Economy continuing to sputter
~Record number of foreclosures and bankruptcies continuing to increase
~housing crisis
~financial markets crisis
~Iraq continues to be mired in some "new" crisis after another
~Costs continue to rise in Iraq, including the costs for caring for increasing numbers of disabled vets
~Bush approval dismal at 30% or below.
You'd think Clinton or Obama would be way ahead.
The reality is that as of today, even as all of the above events are occurring, McCain is running more or less even against either Dem. Who knows what the future may hold, but the present isn't that encouraging.
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A winning strategy for Obama
Forget about putting Ted Strickland on the ticket in order to win Ohio. That's much too narrow-minded.
Want a winning strategy for Obama?
Put John Edwards on the ticket. Edwards brings Southern charm and gritty, blue-collar empathy to balance out Obama's appeal among the latte-sippers, the college kids, and the African Americans.
Now all we have to do is convince Edwards that it isn't demeaning to run for VP a second time.....
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What about analysis on HIllary's chance.....
The race isn't over yet; what about writing an analysis on how Hillary will get to 270? Put it side by side to his and see who has more chance. This election is supposed to be a no-brainer, but O poses so many new variables that are hard to predict. He's far riskier than Hillary who, I have no doubt, will beat McCain hands down.
She is smart, articulate, comes prepared, on top of issues, super-energetic, a tough fighter and arguably has the most taste/knowledge on what a president's job entails having been 8 years in the White House (I believe since she's an involved wife Bill and her talked a lot about policies, etc) and last but not least she has a broader appeal across different and important demographics.
These factors super delegates have to really weigh and hence, the race is far from over.
Obama has been sheltered by the media, we don't know how the public might respond when the dirt is starting to trickle out as it is now.... That's why all this blind adoration toward an untested rookie with unbelievably flimsy and thin resume does disservice to us all. Let's start exposing Obama now because the Reps will launch a very brutal campaign soon enough and then it will be too late to do anything.
Wake up and smell the coffee. All this euphoria about the precious, gifted, rare candidate of "hope and change" is just fiction. There is NO evidence to support it -none whatsoever- other than his speeches (which he doesn't write himself).
I'm not saying I don't think he'll be a good president one day. He might be, but now it's too risky. Why gamble? He needs to do his homework first, serve in the senate for 2 terms and come back later. He's young and has time on his side, why the rush. We'll regret it that we waste this opportunity just because we are so enamored by our own idealistic, unrealistic projection on a blank slate.
Read this:
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23643866-5013948,00.html
The illusion that is Barack Obama
Fred Siegel | May 05, 2008
POLITICAL campaigning necessarily produces a wide gap between words and deeds. This is the price of bringing together a broad coalition with disparate interests. All effective politicians are at times authentically insincere or sincerely inauthentic. Exaggeration, embellishment, overstatement, doubletalk, deception and lies presented as metaphorical truths are the order of the day.
So, of course, Barack Obama is no different. He exaggerates the credit he deserves for a limited piece of ethics-reform legislation. He embellishes when he presents himself as having had a consistent record on the Iraq war when in fact he's done a fair amount of zigzagging.
He engages in doubletalk when, on free trade and Iraq, he tells the yokels one thing and the policy people another. He overstates when he presents his minimal accomplishments in the Illinois Senate as proof of his stature. He engages in systematic deception when he says he doesn't take money from lobbyists.
He presents a lie as metaphorical truth when he says it was the 1965 bloody Sunday attacks on peaceful civil rights protesters in Selma, Alabama, that inspired his parents to marry. (They had been married for years already.)
All of this is unappealing, but also unexceptional. What makes it different is that there's not just a gap but a chasm between his actions and his professed principles, which would normally kill a candidacy. And because his deeds are so few, the disparity is all the more salient.
Obama, far more than the others, is the "judge me by what I say and not what I do" candidate. He wants to be the conscience of the country without necessarily having one himself.
The disparity between Obama's rhetoric of transcendence and his conventional Chicago racial and patronage politics is a leitmotiv of his political career. In New York, politicians (Al Sharpton excepted) are usually forced to pay at least passing tribute to universal principles and the ideal of clean government.
But Chicago, until recently a city of Lithuanians, blacks and Poles governed by Irishmen on the patronage model of the Italian Christian Democrats, is the city of political and cultural tribalism.
Blacks adapted to the tribalism and the corrupt patronage politics that accompanied it. Historically, one of the ironies of Chicago politics is that the clean-government candidates have been the most racist, while those most open to black aspirations have been the most corrupt. When the young Jesse Jackson received his first audience with then mayor Richard Daley Sr - impervious to the universalism of the civil rights movement in its glory - offered him a job as a toll-taker. Jackson thought the offer demeaning but in time adapted.
In Chicago, racial reform has meant that the incumbent mayor, Richard M. Daley, has been cutting blacks in on the loot. Louis Farrakhan, Jackson, Jeremiah Wright and Obama are all, in part, the expression of that politics. It hasn't always worked for Chicago, which, under the pressure of increasing taxes to pay for bloated government, is losing its middle class. But it has served the city's political class admirably.
For all his Camelot-like rhetoric, Obama is a product, in significant measure, of the political culture that Chicago Tribune columnist John Kass described: "We've had our chief of detectives sent to prison for running the Outfit's (the mob's) jewellery-heist ring. And we've had white guys with Outfit connections get $100 million in affirmative action contracts from their drinking buddy, Mayor Richard Daley ... That's the Chicago way."
At no point did Obama, the would-be saviour of US politics, challenge this corruption, except for face-saving gestures as a legislator. He was, in his own Harvard law way, a product of it.
Why, you may ask, did the operators of Chicago's political machine support Obama? Part of the answer was given long ago by the then boss of Chicago, Jake Arvey.
read more here
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23643866-5013948,00.html