More on why McCain should win: The PUMA factor

In a recent posting, I went on the record to say that John McCain should win the presidential election Tuesday, and I listed five reasons which lead me to this conclusion. They are media bias, pollster oversampling of Democrats, Obama campaign hubris, the Democrat candidate's many suspect associations and the fact that the American electorate has a center-right majority.

There is a sixth reason to believe that the GOP candidate will pull this one out of the fire, and, like the other five, it is a topic you won't read much about in the newspapers or see on the alphabet television networks, all of which are in the tank for Obama. It's the PUMA factor.

PUMA is an acronym which stands for Party Unity My *ss. Backers of Sen. Hillary Clinton formed this "un-party" when they felt their candidate got a raw deal in the race for the Democrat Party's presidential nomination. In their view, party chairman Howard Dean and the Obama campaign conspired to prevent Sen. Clinton from winning the contest. They did not jump ship at the time, however, and most of them could have been persuaded to back Sen. Barack Obama's presidential campaign. All Obama needed to do to secure their support was to name Sen. Clinton as his running mate, a course of action many of his advisors had recommended.

Obama, however, would have none of that. Showing his thin skin over some of the remarks Sen. Clinton had made about him in the rough and tumble of the primary contest, Obama, who saw eye to eye with his wife Michelle on the matter, rejected Clinton and invited Sen. Joe Biden instead to join him on the ticket. The decision left many scratching their heads. Biden had a long-held reputation for his runaway mouth, and his highly-toouted foreign policy expertise has been tarnished by such bad thinking as sending, no strings attached, a $200 Million check to Iran as a sign of America's good will, partitioning Iraq along sectarian and ethnic lines and some other really bad ideas. A Clinton selection would have made the Democrat ticket a formidable one, and, in the opinion of many political junkies, one which would have been hard for John McCain to beat. As a result, Obama finds himself just days before the election, in a year when a Democrat sweep was supposed to be a sure thing, unable to close the deal and locked in a very close race with McCain.

In years past, political candidates have made peace with their primary opponents, no matter how bitter the primary struggle or how far apart they may have been on both style and substance, to form unity tickets which rolled on to victory. John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson did it, as did Ronald W. Reagan and George H.W. Bush. But Obama, who has repeatedly shown that he cannot take the sort of criticism that his campaign regularly dishes out, failed to rise to the occasion. This failure to bury the hatchet and get on with the business of winning an election was a fatal mistake. Obama made some enemies who will not forgive nor forget. Although Sen. Clinton has made a public show of support for the Obama campaign, this is not true of many of her supporters. As payback for what they see as misogyny and pettiness toward Clinton, they have committed themselves to the effort to elect his opponent.

There are many PUMA sites on the web, too many to try to link to here. But a good start would be to go here and here. PUMAs have also joined with other disaffected Democrats, independents and Republicans in forming associations opposed to Obama. These are the "NOBAMA" coalitions, some of which can be found on the internet here and here. The hottest of all the many PUMA web addresses is this one: Hillbuzz.com.

The big question is how many PUMAs are there among the electorate? Not all of the 18 million who voted for Sen. Clinton in the primaries will vote for John McCain. But it is difficult to pin down the exact number of those who will mark their ballots for the Republican. This is because many of them are intentionally concealing this fact by telling pollsters when called that they will vote for Obama, although their intention is clearly to vote against him, i.e., for McCain. Others from their ranks are telling the pollsters that they are independent and undecided. Still others will say outright that they are going to vote for McCain. If this seems somewhat confusing, that is the general idea - don't give the Obama campaign's oppo people any useful intel.

The Associated Press estimates that four in ten of what they call "persuadables" are voters who are counted as undecided but had voted for Sen. Clinton in the primaries. In recent national polls, Obama had the support of 88% of Democrats. How many of those are stealth PUMAs on the prowl is anyone's guess. But what should be even more troubling for the Obama campaign can be found in the internals of the latest Rassmussen poll of Pennsylvania. Obama is only drawing 75% of that state's Democrats. The junior senator from Illinois cannot win the Keystone State with that much softness in his base support.

Each state is unique, of course, and you can't transplant trends from one state into another or carry them over to the national picture as assumptions. But if McCain can pick up four or five of every seven undecideds, and if just two or three percent of those who say they will vote for Obama actually mark their ballots the other way (which would account for the stealth PUMAs and those who are afraid to say they are for McCain for fear of being branded as "racist"), he will win this election.

In just a few days, the roar of the wildcats known as PUMAs may be a very loud one indeed. Add to it the responsive chord struck by Joe the Plumber, who has made many blue collar workers, with their upwardly mobile dreams of owning their own small businesses some day, step out of the shadows. Add also the resounding sound of a previously unexcited conservative base which Sarah Palin has single-handedly mobilized, and John McCain could be hearing some sweet music Tuesday night.

“There are many posts describing how PUMAs have told pollsters, or intend to tell them if called, that they will vote for Obama when they intend to vote for McCain.” ~ JP

This is a copy of what I sent out to my email lists on 10/23/08:

PUMAS: “Don’t underestimate us!!” “We’re lying to the pollsters”

PUMA = Democrat “PARTY UNITY MY A$$” -— “And they’re NOT being polled accurately.”

First some comments:

“We all remember Harriet Christian; the lady who made a big scene after the DNC gave the nomination to B. Hussein. Well, Harriet and other PUMAs are taking weekend bus tours every weekend into PA. Check it out: http://noquarterusa.net/blog/2008/10/22/get-on-board-harriet%e2%80%99s-bus/

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I’ll say one thing for the PUMA’s too, they are very organized and when it comes to getting things done, they don’t mess around. 34

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“I was reading one of their forums and some of them are now listening [noon to 3 AM dial] on a regular basis to Hannity and Rush, and even Coulter (when’s she’s on Hannity and Colmes) with new ears. http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/today.guest.html Back in 1998, Rush is what turned me on to conservatism. I think if some of them listen long enough, they’ll discover Limbaugh is not the racist like they have been told and actually very smart when it comes to how the Dems operate. It’s hard to go back once you’ve had your eyes opened. It’s been 10 years now for me, and while I was never a Democrat per se, I was fairly brainwashed toward liberal/pop culture think. 30

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There is a guy a few streets down that always had Gore, Kerry and Dem signs. I think he is retired union. I have been watching his house because he always has yard signs. Today he has a McCain sign up. Other Dem houses I footnote in my head that had Kerry/Gore signs have no signs or McCain. ... McCain versus Obama is about 70 to 1. There are probably 2 to 1 or 2.5 to 1 more McCain signs then Bush 2000/2004. I think people are a lot more motivated. 44

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I normally wouldn’t believe stuff like this except for two women in my office. Both were ardent Hillary supporters in the primary. Both have told me they will be voting for McCain. I was very shocked when they each told me this because both of these women are feminist. They resent like hell the way the MSM treated Hillary and crowned Obama. They also said they did not like the way the MSM has treated Sarah Palin. Like I said I was shocked because I thought both of these women would never vote Republican. Maybe there is hope for this country! 46

Win or lose, Obama may have broken the Democratic Party
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/2113100/posts
By Christopher Cook

I talk to them every day.

To call them “disgruntled Hillary supporters” is to drastically underestimate who they are and what has happened to their thinking. To call them “disgruntled Hillary supporters” suggests that they’re only upset at Hillary’s loss in the primary, and that they’ll be back after the anger settles.

Wrong.

Okay, that will undoubtedly be true of some of thembut not the ones I’ve been talking to. The ones with whom I ..have been speaking will NOT be back under the Democrats’ tent any time soon, and possibly ever.

You see, they didn’t just get upset at a loss, they saw something in the Democratic Party that they didn’t like.

Now, you and I will tell them, “oh, that’s been there for a long time.” I myself, especially after a recent improvement to my education on the subject, might suggest that what they see now has been creeping in since the start of the Wilson administration.

For right now, though, those details don’t matter. What matters is that they’ve seen the leftist rot eating away at an American political party.

The ones with whom we are in contact are not leaving the party out of some petulance at a primary loss, they’re leaving the party because that rot has been exposed to them.

Barack Obama has lifted up the carpet and showed them the rotting floorboards (or teeming roacheswhatever metaphor you like) underneath.

Obama represents the far left, and he will bring them in with him if he wins.

And, as scary as that prospect is, he has at least done us the favor of making the Democrats leftward lurch sufficiently obvious that it has awoken and angered a significant subset of the Democrats’ base.

They’re angryat what they see in the party, in the media, and in the radical leftist groups committing so much crime on Obama’s behalf. . .

They’re working HARD for McCain . . .

They’re making quiet confessions of conservative views and open declarations that they will never vote Democrat again . . .

And they’re NOT being polled accurately.

They’ve also got a pretty serious manifesto up at Just Say No Deal. I will include the first portion of the text here, with a link to continue reading.

This is not a transitory phenomenon; this is a sea-change:

We Clinton Supporters and bloggers have been viewing the death of the Democratic Party through the lens of a coup or hostile takeover by its liberal left wing. We witnessed in disbelief as our party became the party of violence, sexism, misogyny, racism, thuggery, theft, corruption, caucus fraud, and voter registration fraud.

Before casting a vote, Centrist Dems and all other Americans must stop looking at the current Democratic Party through the perception they have of what the Democratic Party once meant.

that party was dead and buried on may 31, 2008

This is not your grandmother’s left wing (or maybe it is). What is now being uncovered is that the takeover of the Democratic Party is being orchestrated by a group of people with socialist/marxist beliefs, with a pinch of fascism sprinkled inbeing led by a hand picked, groomed and marketed messiah under the guise of “progressivism”with a belief system that states the ends justify the means. This may also explain why well over 90% of the African American population is voting for this candidate, and though some of it has to do with his race, more may be because of his socialist philosophy.

barack obama is that hand picked candidate

Hillary Clinton was systematically destroyed by the “Democratic Party” in the primaries. We may debate her strengths and weaknesses as a candidate, but not being part of the ‘master plan’, she was quite simply irrelevant.

On the other hand, Barack was spoon fed his current core beliefs for decades, and is a willing participant in the downfall of America as you know it. The candidate who has shattered all fund raising records, is now deeply in political debt to his radical associations.

It’s time to understand where this “alien” democratic party is heading with Obama in the foreground and his numerous radical socialist/marxist associates in the background. Let’s start with a history lesson . . .

Continue reading here, http://www.justsaynodeal.com/ about seven paragraphs down.

If the DNC and Democratic Party structure isn’t seriously worried about this, they should be. They may be drunk on Obamahol now, and they may even win the day, but when they sober up, they’re going to see that they’ve lost a number of friends.

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