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Hold Off on Those Obama Victory Predictions
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (44)Polls always tighten right before an election, no matter how far ahead the front-runner is. But I still refuse to jump on the MSM bandwagon and predict with impunity that Tuesday will bring a landslide victory for Sen. Barack Obama. Two new polls reported by Politico.com show McCain gaining in two swing states. Most important, from my perspective, is that one of them is Missouri, which has gone against the presidential victor only one time since 1904 (and that was for Adlai Stevenson of neighboring Illinois).
So with that in mind, I point your attention to the following:
Barack Obama and John McCain are evenly matched in the swing states of North Carolina and Missouri, though Obama is strongly outpacing McCain in two of those states' crucial battleground counties, according to new Politico/InsiderAdvantage polls.
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Could Affluent Suburbs Give Barack Obama a Win Over John McCain?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (15)My post earlier this week on the Pennsylvania polls and the implications thereof has gotten some attention, and so I thought I would check out one point I made: that Obama's lead in the state is largely due to an increase over previous Democratic presidential candidates in his percentages in affluent suburbs. Looking at other state polls that break down results by region, I find some confirmation, but also some qualifications.
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Will Men Vote for Sarah Palin Only Because She Is Hot?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (70)We all knew there was a gender gap in politics, but what we didn't know is that there is also a distinct beauty gap. A new study out today from Northwestern University found that looks matter, especially for female candidates. So maybe John McCain made a good decision in picking Sarah Palin? [See photos of Palin and her family.]
Most shocking was the strong language used to describe why men vote for women candidates. "While gender bias related to a female candidate's attractiveness was consistent across both male and female voters, good looks was almost all that mattered in predicting men's votes for female candidates," according to the release announcing the study. (The bold is mine.)
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Guess Who Has a New Blog? Princeton University Press
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (8)Guess who has a new blog? Princeton University Press. PUP (they use the acronym) is run by my longtime friend Peter Dougherty, who, working under the late Erwin Glikes of Macmillan Free Press, edited my first non-Almanac book, Our Country: The Shaping of America from Roosevelt to Reagan. The PUP webpage features a Bloggingheads interview of economist and PUP author Robert Shiller by Robert Wright.
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Godless Catfight—Elizabeth Dole and Kay Hagan Fight Over the Lord
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (19)In a campaign rife with ugly moments, Sen. Elizabeth Dole's new TV ad accusing Democratic state Sen. Kay Hagan, Dole's opponent for a U.S. Senate seat from North Carolina, of accepting "godless" money is one of the ugliest. It is emblematic of Dole's desperation mode in the final stages of what looks like a losing campaign for re-election.
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My Election Predictions: a Big Obama Win
Tweet Share on Facebook October 31, 2008 Comment (37)Talk about hubris. Way back in June, I decided to take a chance on what sportswriters typically do and predict the season's champion before the games begin.
On the RobertEmmet blog in the first week of June I wrote: Bottom line: President Obama. Big. With 382 electoral votes.
So here, Morgan and Rob, is what I forecast way back then. You can add it to the Thomas Jefferson St. election picks.
On the bright side, I gave Bambi almost all the industrial Midwest, two of the important, contested Rocky Mountain States, and Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio, and Florida.
I also—big mea culpa here—predicted that he would carry Texas.
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Election Prediction: Democrats Won't Get a Filibuster-Proof Senate
Tweet Share on Facebook October 30, 2008 Comment (23)If, as seems likely but not quite certain, Barack Obama is elected next Tuesday, a key question for public policymaking will be how many Democrats are elected to the Senate. Currently, there are 51 Democrats there, including Joe Lieberman, but Democrats are seriously contesting 11 Republican-held seats, and there is a by-no-means-trivial chance that they could win each one. Meanwhile, Republicans are seriously contesting either zero Democratic-held seats, or only one, that of Mary Landrieu in Louisiana. The only public polls there since July are from Rasmussen, and the latest shows Landrieu ahead of Democrat-turned-Republican John Kennedy by 53 percent to 43 percent. So, Landrieu, a narrow winner in 1996 and 2002, seems headed to a third term.
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Barack Obama and the Democrats' Plans for Nationalized Healthcare and Ending 401(k)'s Will Bring Back the GOP
Tweet Share on Facebook October 30, 2008 Comment (30)If Sen. John McCain or some of his high-level campaign staffers knew how to run a presidential campaign, they would have turned information such as this, presented by my U.S. News colleague James Pethokoukis, to voters, combined with Senator Obama's "spread the wealth around" comment. If they had, McCain's poll numbers would look a lot better than they do at this late date.
Yes, too many Americans (unfortunately, in my view) want nationalized healthcare. Yes, they want Social Security to be made fiscally sound. But do they want Daddy Government to reach this far into their beloved 401(k) retirement plans and wreak fiscal havoc? Methinks not. Jimmy P. reports:
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Barack Obama's Irish Heritage
Tweet Share on Facebook October 30, 2008 Comment (31)OK, this is terribly self-indulgent, even for someone named Aloysius.
And admittedly tenuous, even for a people known for stretching ancestral relationships to extremes.
But it turns out that Barack Obama...is Irish.
Saints be praised! Who knew?
On his mother's side, don't you know. (Thanks to the lovely Irish-American writer Caledonia Kearns for the tip.)
Now, everybody, sing along! From the ol' Blarney Stone to the green hills of Tara... There's no one as Irish as Barack O'Bama....
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Barack Obama's Iraq Stance Recalls Eisenhower's Cold War Eloquence
Tweet Share on Facebook October 30, 2008 Comment (4)I watched Barack Obama's 30-minute infomercial last night, and one segment in particular struck a historical chord with me. There was a moment when he was speaking about the Iraq war and asked what use the money spent on Iraq could be put to at home.
It reminded me of a remarkable speech I discovered while I was writing White House Ghosts, where a president spoke about the costs of the Cold War:
Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
Remarkable eloquence—one might call it Kennedy-esque. Of course, one would be wrong—it comes from Dwight D. Eisenhower.
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