Posted on 02/25/2008 4:28:29 PM PST by jdm
So we have been treated of late to the usual chorus of claims that the GOP is doomed, doomed I tell you, at the polls if McCain faces Obama. Well, Rasmussen's daily tracker has McCain pulling ahead of Obama the past 4 days, and now up 47-43 in a national head-to-head matchup. The RCP multi-poll average still gives a 47-43 nod to Obama. (McCain's matchup with Hillary is more favorable). But if you looked at polls taken between January 28 and March 7 of 2004, you would see Kerry leading Bush in 15 polls, to 7 showing Bush ahead and 3 ties, and an unweighted average result of 47.48 for Kerry to 45.2 for Bush. Gerald Ford trailed by 33 points in August and lost by 2. (H/T) George HW Bush trailed by 17 in July and won by a healthy margin. Those are the most famous examples, but hardly the only ones.
But, you say, huge primary turnout for the Democrats presages a landslide? Maybe, but Democrats traditionally have much higher primary turnout than the GOP:
That's right: Democratic turnout in the primaries was 47% higher than GOP turnout in 1980, and 89% higher in 1988. Any Democrats looking to replay those races?
Folks, it's a long way to November. Yes, you can slice and dice the polls cited above to make the point that polling (1) has its flaws and (2) can be badly abused if you don't distinguish between good polls and bad. And that's even aside from the fact that these are national polls whereas the election is actually 50 statewide elections. But the point is, there is simply no evidence right now that Obama, whose real record is very unknown to the national electorate and who has never run a campaign against anything resembling a competent Republican opponent, has this race in the bag. He may justifiably be favored over McCain, if you had to put money on this race today. But he is not unbeatable, or if he is the evidence of that is as yet undetectable.
I can't see rational people voting for Obama over McCain for POTUS especially when voting in secret.
google “odinga kenya sharia obama” the results will astound you.
It is good news today but subject to change from week to week.
Why are white men voting for Obama - he is an anti-white racists! White men are voting for him just because they don’t like Hillary - HE IS WORST THAN HILLARY! They really need to think about what he will do if he wins - white men will really get the shaft if he is elected.
http://www.freedomsenemies.com/_more/obama.htm
Yup. I book-marked that one.
What troubles me most is not the appeal of one philosophy over another. McCain would win that hands down given Obama’s far-left liberalism, but voters tend to worship youth, especially those with charisma. Two of my daughters’ friends have chosen Obama over Hillary because they are concerned about a trend toward dynasties (Bush and Clinton). Despite this flawed logic, they are intelligent, well-educated young women.
I see the negatives going way up for both Obama and McCain all the way to November 4. The majority of voters will truly be going to the polls to vote “against” the other major Presidential candidate instead of going to the polls in order to vote in the majority “for” a major Presidential candidate.
I hope they use that photo in ads come election time!!!
* Obama vanquishes and embarasses Hillary, ending the Clinton reign of terror.
* Denver's Democrat convention makes 1968 convention look like a day at Disney.
* Obama begins to make mistakes, gets exposed, wears thin on voters during general campaign.
* Democrats begin to turn on Obama as weak candidate who can't win.
* McCain picks solid conservative as his VP candidate. McCain wins election.
* McCain decides not to run in 2012. We get a real conservative elected and win back Congress.
OK, I can dream, right? :-)
I just hope McCain “slips up” during the debate and calls him “Senator Osama”-ooops my bad
No and Hell no.
Dominic Lawson: Obama must beware of turning into a cult
His speeches are studded with religious rhetoric. A chapter in his book is entitled ‘Faith’
Tuesday, 26 February 2008
At this stage, it must be desperation rather than strategy: Hillary Clinton has unleashed the potentially deadly weapon of ridicule against Barack Obama. The almost hoarse Senator from New York told supporters in Rhode Island yesterday: “I could just stand up here and say [that] the sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing and everyone will know we should do the right thing and the world will be perfect.”
Mrs Clinton did not mention her rival in this peroration but it was a very pertinent caricature of Mr Obama as the new Messiah. In fairness to Obama, the greatest claims for his near-divinity come not from his own lips but from his supporters. One of them is his own wife Michelle, who announced: “Our souls are broken in this nation. Barack Obama is the only person who understands that ... before we can work on the problems, we have to fix our souls.” Even such a political veteran as the eighth-term Illinois Congressman Bobby Rush says Obama’s political career has been “divinely ordered”. His language is moderate compared to that used by some of Obama’s youthful supporters, who talk openly of being members of “a cult” and of their rallies as being “religious experiences”.
More surprisingly, seen-it-all reporters seem to have undergone a similar epiphany. MSNBC’s Chris Matthews – somewhat to the consternation of his co-hosts – declared that Obama “comes along and he has the answers. This is the New Testament”. The experienced Washington correspondent for The Australian, Geoff Elliott, reported: “You know something special is going on. The atmosphere at his events is such that one wonders if Obama is about to walk out with a basket with some loaves and fishes to feed the thousands.”
Obama has a stock line which seems to play straight into the notion that he is an instrument of the divine. To a number of audiences, he has declared: “My job is be so persuasive that if there’s anybody left out there who is still not sure whether they will vote, or is still not clear who they will vote for, that a light will shine through that window, a beam of light will come down on you, you will experience an epiphany ... and you will suddenly realise that you must go to the polls and vote for Obama.”
To be fair to Obama, this is said in a manner which just leaves open the idea that he is not being entirely serious. Yet I don’t believe that those applauding this riff see it as elevated irony – and it is slightly creepy even as a joke. Perhaps it isn’t a joke at all, but completely sincere: Obama’s speeches are studded with religious rhetoric. For example, last October he told an audience of 4,000 that he hoped to be “an instrument of God” and that “I am confident that we can create a Kingdom right here on Earth”.
This sort of rhetoric from an American politician is not a novelty. There has been a strong sense ever since Independence – indeed it is at the heart of America’s own sense of uniqueness – that this is a nation chosen by God, a sort of New Jerusalem. Barack Obama is certainly not the first campaigner for the presidency to use almost Biblical language to tell the American people that they and they alone can “save” the world from sin and wickedness.
Yet in recent decades the American Left has shunned such religiosity, regarding similar language used by the so-called “religious right” with extreme distaste. In such a strongly churchgoing country as the US, this was always going to limit the appeal of the Democrats. Anyone who has read Obama’s book The Audacity Of Hope will already have known that the junior Senator from Illinois had no intention of ignoring this constituency, were he ever to run for the presidency.
There is an entire chapter on this, entitled “Faith”. In it, Obama wrote: “The discomfort of some progressives with any hint of religiosity has often inhibited us from effectively addressing issues in moral terms. Some of the problem is rhetorical: scrub language of all religious content and we forfeit the imagery and terminology through which millions of Americans understand both their own personal morality and social justice.”
He also wrote that for Democrats to shun religiosity is “bad politics” adding: “When we shy away from religious venues and religious broadcasts ... others will fill the vacuum.” Well, if there ever was such a vacuum, Barack Obama is filling it now. As he will certainly have anticipated, many erstwhile Republican voters are seduced by this form of rhetoric and have been indicating that they will vote for Obama. In fact, he has invented a word for these voters: he calls them “Obamicans”.
It is interesting that this seems to have been an unmitigated benefit. Not only has Obama successfully made an appeal to Republicans who viewed other Democrats as godless, but the Left has, by and large, ignored its scruples and refused to criticise its candidate’s studied use of specifically Christian language and imagery. As a result, Obama has got away with claims to metaphysical virtue which would have been denounced as medievally idiotic presumption, had they been uttered by a Republican candidate.
To Obama’s credit, he does not follow the religious Right in denouncing his opponents as wicked. The worst you can say is that this is implicit in his message, rather than explicit. Nevertheless, there is an underlying strain of intolerance in Obama’s message of unification. In his victory speech in Wisconsin last week, he made his usual attack on “special interests”. “We must put aside the divisions in Washington. We must work for a higher purpose” – or perhaps that should be Higher Purpose. Yet to stigmatise “divisions in Washington” is just acceptable rhetoric for denouncing the workings of a complex pluralistic democracy. For “divisions” read “disagreement” – or “opposition”. Obama, of course, is a democrat as well as a Democrat; but there is something in this form of rhetoric that has echoes of fascism, with its idea that the squabbling of mere politicians should be overthrown in favour of one man’s uniquely wise interpretation of the National Will. Phrases such as “everything must be changed” were also the stock-in-trade of fascist orators, raising hopes which ended in the most dreadful disillusionment – and worse.
I think Barack Obama understands this risk. For all the fever of his rallies, his own oratorical style never descends into ranting, still less foam-flecked hysteria. Yet the frenzy he has engendered contains within it the seeds of bitter disappointment, or even tragedy. There is the question of his own physical safety. Less morbidly, what will be the reaction of his supporters if he should fail to be elected President? Perhaps most troubling of all, what will be their reaction if he is elected, but the celestial choirs fail to appear and the world refuses to be perfect?
Obama has been using his strong lead over Hillary to air his dirty laundry and innoculating himself by rebuking her for using dirty tactics.
Obama will probably be the president. Sheep will line up in droves to make history and vote for the first African-American President who also has the bemefit of being the Kennedy of the 21st century.
Hell, Rush is even afraid to go after him with any real venom. So far he has hidden behind his black call screener.
>> Why are white men voting for Obama - he is an anti-white racists!
Remember, these are white male DEMOCRATS.
Half are metrosexuals.
Half are union members; they do as the shop steward tells them.
And (as Yogi Berra might say) the other half are old hippies with drug-addled brains.
Too bad Americans don’t have the good sense to check him out for themselves. They would find plenty to make them run kicking and screaming away from him. I am not sure the media will EVER expose his past.
* Denver's Democrat convention makes 1968 convention look like a day at Disney. 20%
* Obama begins to make mistakes, gets exposed, wears thin on voters during general campaign. 70%
* Democrats begin to turn on Obama as weak candidate who can't win. 25%
* McCain picks solid conservative as his VP candidate. 50%
* McCain decides not to run in 2012. ???
JMHO
He doens’t seen like an American to me. He’s not proud to be an American, refuses for stupid reasons not to wear the symbol of our nation- the flag, and won’t put his hand over his heart during the pledge. This is not an American that needs to ever come near the presidency. His wife is just as bad. They come from a church that spews black power and he’s endorsed by Farrakhan. Can you imagine a white candiate attending a church that preaches White power.
...only...Her Thighness will be the nominee...what ever it takes.
He's much older now, and even meaner and grumpier.
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