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Could 2008 Be a McCain Landslide?
American Thinker ^ | July 13, 2008 | Kyle-Anne Shiver

Posted on 07/13/2008 6:31:09 AM PDT by vietvet67

Ah yes, dear readers, this title has nailed me.  I'm an unconventional thinker, a woman who is wont to go madly against the grain, in nearly all matters.  I'm usually in the unpopular camp, the one who disdains conventional wisdom and consensus science.  I'm just too darned independent-minded for my own good sometimes. 

And 2008 is one of those times. 

John McCain, the poor dear, is being characterized as the tired, old guy, not only by the media elites and the opposition Party, but nearly just as often, by his own prospective voters.  "We're all but doomed," say the naysayers.  Even if McCain manages to squeak through the White House door on the slimmest Electoral College majority, it will be by the skin of his ancient teeth, say the analysts.

Nearly all around the globe, the media trumpets are prematurely heralding an Obama victory with a fanfare fitting for the legendary phoenix arising from the ashes.  The American Obamaphiles are gleefully fondling all their golden eggs, and busily counting their chickens, positively certain that every single one of them will hatch on November 4.

Maybe; maybe not.   

Oh my, I can nearly hear the limb beneath my feet, straining and about to break, as I shimmy out to its farthest reach on this prognostication.

The 2008 Presidential election could be a landslide victory for John McCain.

I'm basing my assessment here on 3 factors:  Time, the Anti-Obama vote and Obama's own arrogance.

Time

It's only July 13th, folks.  There are 113 days remaining until November 4th.  In this internet era, when news travels around the globe faster than a speeding bullet, 113 days are long enough for even the most polished, eloquent orator in American history to put both feet in his mouth dozens of times. 

And every time Obama has one of his infamous verbal slips, it's recorded for profit or just plain fun, and spun into enough YouTube entertainment to last into the next decade.  Every gaffe, every misstep, every flip-flop, turn-around and attempted take-back that the candidate utters, every single day for the next 113, will be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people, who then take their impressions to the office, the diners, the bus stops, the hairdressers and the assembly lines.  The NYT could only ever dream of such influence.

Americans tend to be a forgiving lot, but each one of us has his own personal limit to the number of take-backs he is willing to allow a single person.  I'm predicting that as Obama continues to morph into new positions nearly every day, that a great many voters are going to reach the limit, the point where they stop listening to this candidate because they simply stop trusting his word.

Trust is usually proffered generously, but once lost, disillusionment rarely permits its return, at least not within the confines of 113 days.

How many voters will still trust Obama by November 4th?  Perhaps far less than the conventional wisdom is predicting.  Time is not on Obama's side.

The Anti-Obama Vote

Discouraged conservatives and Republicans, even those who say now that they will stay home on Election Day, are at the end of the day, responsible citizens. They will, I predict, see well in advance of November 4th, just how much damage could be done by Obama, especially if he gets a filibuster-proof Senate majority and an even larger majority in the House of Representatives. 

The Republican anti-Obama vote, I believe, will hinge on two issues, namely, the Supreme Court and our war against IslamoFascism.  Forward thinking Republican voters will vote for treading water with McCain for 4 years over letting the whole American ship go down to defeat.

Disillusionment among loyal Democrats has already begun and is mounting rapidly.  In the wake of Hillary Clinton's concession, a great many disgruntled Democrats started a grassroots groundswell under one banner group, PUMA, which stands for:  Party Unity My A**.  There are already more than 200 separate groups that are uniting under the PUMA banner, with only one thing in common.  They vow that, no matter what, they will not support Barack Obama.  There is already "Democrats for McCain" gear and all the hoopla that goes with it. 

Add to these renegade groups the fact that Obama currently has a web mutiny on his hands, occurring on his very own networking site.  The largest of these mutinous web supporter groups only formed the last week of June and already has more than 22,800 members.  This particular group, "Please vote NO on Telecom Immunity - Get FISA right," formed over the latest Obama flip-flop, reneging on his October FISA promise to "support a filibuster of any bill that includes retroactive immunity for telecommunications companies."  Obama voted for the FISA bill, with immunity still in it.

As I've said already, trust is a fragile commodity.  Once a person loses it, disillusioned followers can get mighty angry and even vindictive.  With 113 days to go, and this many folks already vowing that the Obama they see now is "not the Obama they knew," with some even demanding returns on their campaign contributions, the emotional winds that have carried Barack this far may turn on him.

And I'm predicting that they will.  By November 4th, we could even see hurricane-force passions blowing against Obama and at McCain's waiting back.

Obama's Arrogance

There are few things in this life as satisfying to more experienced people than to see haughty pride get its comeuppance.  

How many working people in this Country have not had at least one experience with a young upstart, walking right out of college and into a position without a lick of hard knocks or humbling pragmatic necessity to be his guide?  He's the guy who's got the whole business figured out because he read a book about it, or the gal who thinks raising great kids is no harder than summarizing the mistakes of others.  And Barack Obama fits this stereotype to a perfect T.

He's 47 years old, but has spent the bulk of his adult life either coddled in an out-of-touch academia or perennially running for one office after another.  He has not even had to stare down or discipline teenage children, for goodness' sake. 

Yet, he's got it all figured out, down to the nuts and bolts of exactly why the rest of us "bitter" folks "cling to" our "religions and our guns."  His two books are little more than summations of what other people think, their motivations and their difficulties.  Reading his two autobiographical books leaves one with the uneasy impression that although Obama thinks he knows everything there is to know about us, he has yet to even figure out himself. 

So, this is the man who has all of life and everything about American politics so well mastered, that he thinks he is ready to be President?

The vast majority of American voters are over 30, and in the voting booth, a candidate gets no extra points for excitement.  No matter how thrilled some will be to vote for Barack Obama, their votes will count not one whit more than the old-fashioned, responsible votes cast for John McCain.

We've already witnessed Obama's highly fortuitous, completely unpredictable rise. 

I'm betting we may also witness his fall before November 4th, and that his fall from grace will be every bit as phenomenal as was his rise.

Kyle-Anne Shiver is a frequent contributor to American Thinker.  She welcomes your comments at kyleanneshiver.com.


TOPICS: News/Current Events
KEYWORDS: electionpresident; islamofascism; mccain; mccainlist; rino
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To: wtc911; libertylover
See, I think it will be a landslide....I just don’t know who will win.
The last two elections were Red/Blue, and rather evenly balanced. But that isn't cast in concrete forever; it requires a distinct difference between the candidates. We're unhappy with McCain because he's too eager to "reach across the aisle." That makes him vulnerable in the "Red" states. Obama tended to win primaries in "Red" southern states with big populations of blacks but with Republican majorities in the last two elections.

So this will be a "purple" rather than a red/blue election - and whoever wins anywhere can, by and large, win anywhere else. There is no reason to think that such an election will necessarily be a nail-biter one election night - even if the polls look like it going in.

Think of it this way: even if two people toss honest 20 coins, so that the expected value of each is ten heads, you would not expect both of them actually to throw exactly ten heads. One would, probably, throw a different number than ten - and the other would, probably, throw a different number than that.

For the reasons the author of the piece cited, and because Obama did so poorly in the last few primaries, I think Obama will lose the general election. And more likely big than narrowly.


81 posted on 07/13/2008 11:12:51 AM PDT by conservatism_IS_compassion (The conceit of journalistic objectivity is profoundly subversive of democratic principle.)
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To: rabscuttle385
McCain...landslide...what a pipe dream... ..... The Just Say No to Juan McCain Ping List.


82 posted on 07/13/2008 11:33:27 AM PDT by Polybius
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To: G Larry

1,2 - requires a Constitutional Ammendment. Not likely to get those.

The rest - a lot more likely.


83 posted on 07/13/2008 12:39:20 PM PDT by Jack Black
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To: RobinOfKingston; vietvet67; Jeff Head
Not one, but two autobiographies. Both before the ripe old age of 47!

Obama rise to the threshold of the presidency is nothing if not magically swift. Just about this time 20 years ago, he was preparing to enter Harvard Law School in the fall of 1988. His election two years later to president of the Harvard Law Review as the first "black" to hold that position is the linchpin of his entire subsequent career, a chronology of which follows:

Late 1988, entered Harvard Law School.

Summer 1989, interned at the law firm of Sidley & Austin in Chicago.

Feb. 1990, elected president of the Harvard Law Review. This was widely reported and was followed in the media by several long, detailed profiles.

Summer 1990, interned at the law firm of Hopkins & Sutter in Chicago.

1991, graduated from Harvard and returned to Chicago. He was recruited by the University of Chicago Law School, which gave him a fellowship and an office to work on a book about race relations. Obama never wrote that book. Instead, he and his wife went to Bali, where he wrote "Dreams From My Father." (Obama was a Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School from 1992–1996, and a Senior Lecturer 1996–2004.)

Apr-Oct. 1992, Obama directed Illinois Project Vote.

1993, Obama joined Davis, Miner, Barnhill & Galland, a law firm specializing in civil rights litigation and neighborhood economic development. He was an associate from 1993 to 1996, then of counsel from 1996 to 2004. His law license becoming inactive in 2002.

1995, "Dreams From My Father" was published.

1996, Obama is elected to the Illinois state senate, where he served until being elected to the U.S. Senate.

2004, Obama was elected to the U.S. Senate. (He delivered the keynote address at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004, before the election.) He was sworn in early in January 2005, and immediately began planning his run for the presidency.

Oct. 2006, "The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream" was published.

Feb. 2007, Obama announced his candidacy for president. He had been a U.S. senator for just two years.

BTW, in addition to his breathtaking race up the ladder during those years, Obama served on a number of boards of directors between 1992 and 2002.

Let me make this as crystal clear as possible. OBAMA ANNOUNCED FOR THE PRESIDENCY ON THE BASIS OF 8 YEARS AS A STATE SENATOR AND 2 YEARS AS A U.S. SENATOR. That's it. That's the basis on which this man is building his presidential run. That, and his gadfly hopping around from one patronage position to another during the 1990's.

ALL of it rests on one affirmative-action achievement, which was his election as the first "black" president of the Harvard Law Review.

There are plenty of fully black high achievers in this country who are more qualified to be president than this arrogant twit. So why Obama? What, or who, made a junior senator think he should even consider a run for the presidency with such a light resume? Either he's the luckiest SOB on the planet, or he's somebody's sock puppet front man. There simply is no other logical conclusion.

84 posted on 07/13/2008 12:39:29 PM PDT by Wolfstar (Only a selfish, idiotic coward thinks the way to win in politics is for his own side to lose.)
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To: Wolfstar
Either he's the luckiest SOB on the planet, or he's somebody's sock puppet front man. There simply is no other logical conclusion.

Never understood how anyone could get this far with, essentially, nothing in the bank. That doesn't mean money. I vote for the "front man" hypothesis.

85 posted on 07/13/2008 1:19:37 PM PDT by RobinOfKingston (Man, that's stupid ... even by congressional standards.)
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To: TennTuxedo

Denial just ain’t a river in Egypt.


86 posted on 07/13/2008 2:03:27 PM PDT by kabar
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To: RobinOfKingston
I vote for the "front man" hypothesis.

Me too. Whether his Harvard Law Review presidency, and the subsequent media attention it garnered, brought him to the notice of a (ahem, cough) "mentor" who boosted him to where he is now, or someone bought that HLR presidency for him, we'll probably never know. We just know that was Obama's first step up the ladder.

What I do know is that such breathtakingly meteoric political rises to the doorstep of national executive leadership simply do not happen -- at least not historically in Western democratic forms of government. Heck, they rarely even happen in totalitarian governments, either. However, they do happen in coups and other forms of shortcuts to political power.

The quick rise of John F. Kennedy pales in comparison to Obama's rocketship ride to the top. JFK at least served with distinction the in Navy during WWI. He was in the Congress for 14 years before being elected president: a U.S. congressman for six years, then a senator for eight. Besides, we know who was behind Kennedy's rise, his old bootlegger father Joe, former ambassador to Great Britain.

87 posted on 07/13/2008 2:33:39 PM PDT by Wolfstar (Only a selfish, idiotic coward thinks the way to win in politics is for his own side to lose.)
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To: vietvet67

I think McCain will win. I don’t know what the spread will be.


88 posted on 07/13/2008 3:32:03 PM PDT by ckilmer (Phi)
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To: kabar
Denial just ain’t a river in Egypt.

Correct, it is something practiced by some not so smart conservatives who took their ball home so no one else could play with it.

89 posted on 07/13/2008 5:04:21 PM PDT by TennTuxedo
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To: Polybius
I see no evidence that she is “excited” about her crush on Obama.

Perhaps the room is just too hot.

90 posted on 07/13/2008 10:57:59 PM PDT by tdscpa
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To: Mike Darancette

The tracking polls on 7/13/08 are a virtual tie (Rasmussen)which tells me that Obama is in some trouble. McCain may win 40 states...

...as many on these boards keep telling us, polls in July mean nothing...you are not factoring in Obama’s convention bump, which may put him up by 15%...then McCain must respond effectively, which I doubt he can do sufficiently (I keep thinking Bob Dole redux)...and as for McCain winning 40 states, that requires flipping seven or eight states Kerry won...which states is McCain going to flip...answer honestly...


91 posted on 07/14/2008 6:29:37 AM PDT by IrishBrigade
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To: IrishBrigade

You’re right Obama is superman McCain hasn’t a chance.


92 posted on 07/14/2008 6:31:31 AM PDT by Mike Darancette (Obama's idea of trickle-down economics is to piss on business.)
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To: Hildy

Disagree...he’s going to win..and unless he does something completely freaky, he’s going to win in a landslide..I’ve said this from day one...

...and you’re basing that on what...certainly not from a perusal of the EC map...by pollsters who don’t make their livings by being completely wrong...


93 posted on 07/14/2008 6:33:00 AM PDT by IrishBrigade
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To: vietvet67

The RNC cannot get enough volunteers for their convention.

People in the convention area are putting their homes up for rent with no takers.

McCain is a most unlikeable candidate.


94 posted on 07/14/2008 6:41:34 AM PDT by Lijahsbubbe
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To: Mike Darancette

You’re right Obama is superman McCain hasn’t a chance...

...hey, simply asking you to back up your postion with a realistic argument...


95 posted on 07/14/2008 6:43:05 AM PDT by IrishBrigade
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To: IrishBrigade
Hey, I read the same stories as you...AND I talk to people. So many people I know who usually vote Dem, ALOT OF JEWS, will be voting republican this year. Not voting for Obama is not something many people are comfortable talking about. But I believe that when they get in the privacy of the voting booth, this will change.

In fact, I've already made a monetary bet with somebody on this site. I'm really fairly confident. I'm pretty good at picking winners.

It's only going to get worse for Obama. He's just too inexperienced. And that inexperience is bringing him down.

96 posted on 07/14/2008 7:20:40 AM PDT by Hildy
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To: Don Corleone

Only 57 states! / laughing


97 posted on 07/14/2008 11:28:04 AM PDT by bootless (Never Forget - And Never Again. And Always Act.)
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To: IrishBrigade
hey, simply asking you to back up your postion with a realistic argument

OK:
If Hillary were the nominee do you think that she would only be up 2-3 points? You have to ask yourself why this is. BHO may get a bump after the convention. Then again he is quite capable of jumping he shark and going off script.

98 posted on 07/14/2008 2:04:13 PM PDT by Mike Darancette (Obama's idea of trickle-down economics is to piss on business.)
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