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The Race Isn't Necessarily Over for Barack Obama and John McCain
Tweet Share on Facebook October 9, 2008 Comment (182)Does Obama have it all locked up? My colleague at Thomas Jefferson Street, Robert Schlesinger, thinks so. And he may very well prove to be right. When we look back over the course of the campaign some time after November 4, we may very well conclude that Barack Obama sprinted to a lead during the two weeks following the coagulation of credit on September 18. Obama's coolness during the financial crisis, combined with John McCain's impulsiveness, convinced many voters that Obama was the safer choice, the story line will go. And Obama's big advantage in television advertising contributed to his advance in target states, as Republican blogger Patrick Ruffini argues. As Robert notes, Obama's current leads in several Bush '04 states means that McCain must change the basic tenor of the campaign in order to win; eking out a narrow margin in one or two states won't do it in the current state of opinion. And no one has a clear idea of how McCain can change the dynamic. So, the argument goes, Obama has this thing locked up.
But maybe not.
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Sarah Palin—Feminist or Victim of Sexism?
Tweet Share on Facebook October 9, 2008 Comment (40)The Republican right, in all its glory, is going bonkers over a Newsweek cover with what some call a highly unflattering picture of their fearless leader, Gov. Sarah Palin.
Despite countless magazine pictures and covers with similarly unflattering pix of Sen. Hillary Clinton and Sen. Barack Obama (and his wife, Michelle), this one, they whine, shows too many wrinkles and too much unsightly facial hair and was taken from too close an angle. Apparently you've got to see one in person to get the full effect.Meanwhile, Reuters ran some pictures of Palin that truly are tasteless and deserve more attention than the volumes of blogosphere venom spewed on the Newsweek cover. Taken through Palin's legs and from behind her, they make it appear that male members of the audience are peering right up her skirt. Now that's deserving of conservative alarm.
Don't take my word for it—take a look for yourself.
Meanwhile, a gadfly president of a local chapter of the National Organization for Women endorsed Palin this week at a rally in California. Shelly Mandell even said, in reference to Palin, "This is what a feminist looks like."
Let's not go there. Palin has called herself a feminist (in her now infamous interview with CBS's Katie Couric), and every American gets to choose his or her own labels, no matter how inappropriate they may be. Feminist is not the first word I would link with Palin. Lipstick and pit bull are much higher up on the list.
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Obama Had Better Not Celebrate Before Actually Beating McCain
Tweet Share on Facebook October 9, 2008 Comment (42)Rob, my colleague here at Thomas Jefferson Street, has invited us to quarrel with his declaration that the presidential race is over.
So, here goes.
In the most recent NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, which showed Barack Obama with a 49 to 43 percent lead, voters were asked to choose between two statements.
Statement A: We need a president who will provide changes from the current Bush administration policies and create a government with more active oversight to protect consumers in areas such as housing and financial transactions.
Statement B: We need a president who will provide changes from the current policies in Congress and deal with waste and fraud in the system to protect taxpayers from government inefficiency and pork-barrel spending.
A big majority—58 percent—of those polled chose Statement B, the McCain-ish position. Only 38 percent chose Statement A, the Obama-like declaration.
As Democratic pollster Peter Hart put it in his latest analysis: "The reason this election is still ahead of us is that voter anger could turn into a stampede in any number of directions."
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Obama May Be Favored Against McCain, but It Ain't Over 'Til It's Over
Tweet Share on Facebook October 9, 2008 Comment (26)Robert, my colleague here at Thomas Jefferson Street, wrote today that Barack Obama has the race sewn up. In my heart of hearts, boss, I've been saying essentially the same thing for a week now. Personally, I agree it sure looks like it's over.
But professionally, I am duty-bound to add there are several game-changer scenarios that still might occur to create a McCain win—none of them good but all of them possible.
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Barack Obama Will Defeat John McCain—This One's Over
Tweet Share on Facebook October 9, 2008 Comment (283)The presidential election is still a few weeks away, but the presidential race is over.
Sure, there's still one more presidential debate; and a month is a proverbial lifetime in politics, but a sober look at both the current electoral landscape and political history tells us that—barring a reality-altering political deus ex machina—Barack Obama will be our 44th president.
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Barney Frank's Fannie and Freddie Racism Regarding the Financial Crisis
Tweet Share on Facebook October 8, 2008 Comment (50)Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, is doing his best to outshine Joe Biden in the silly comments department. As the Associated Press reports:
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Immigration and the Mortgage Meltdown
Tweet Share on Facebook October 8, 2008 Comment (60)The Wall Street Journal had a fascinating story on the regions with the most underwater mortgages, together with an invaluable map. When you look at the map, you'll see that the areas facing the greatest impact are also the areas most affected by immigration. The Inland Empire of California, metro Phoenix and Las Vegas, south Florida—all have had heavy influxes of Latino immigrants or of Anglos leaving immigrant-dominated places like Los Angeles and Miami-Dade counties. Homeowning here was in effect subsidized by the toxic-waste mortgages pumped through the system by Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and other improvident financial institutions. Now evidence is accumulating that Latino migrants are returning to their home countries because of the housing bust (construction jobs have disappeared), tougher immigration law enforcement, and a longer-term demographic trend that may be having an effect: a sharp decline in birthrates in Mexico and other Latin countries about 18 years ago. For speculation, some of which goes farther than I would, on how immigration has interacted with cheap mortgages, you can see any number of items in Steve Sailer's interesting blog. I hope to look further into this when I have the time—but campaign 2008 is calling.
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Thomas Friedman's McCarthyite Tax Attack on Sarah Palin
Tweet Share on Facebook October 8, 2008 Comment (29)In today's New York Times, columnist Thomas Friedman takes Sarah Palin to the woodshed for her rebuttal in last Thursday's veep debate to one of Joe Biden's sillier comments. "You said recently that higher taxes or asking for higher taxes or paying higher taxes is patriotic," Palin told Biden. "In the middle class of America, which is where Todd and I have been all of our lives, that's not patriotic."
After thinking about it for a week, here is Friedman's considered reaction:
What an awful statement. Palin defended the government's $700 billion rescue plan. She defended the surge in Iraq, where her own son is now serving. She defended sending more troops to Afghanistan. And yet, at the same time, she declared that Americans who pay their fair share of taxes to support all those government-led endeavors should not be considered patriotic.
What a pernicious twisting of Palin's statement. The Alaska governor never said that paying one's "fair" share of taxes is unpatriotic—that was Friedman's subjective word. Given her opposition to the Obama-Biden plan to raise taxes on all U.S. businesses and wealthier Americans, no doubt Palin holds different ideas on what is "fair."
What Palin did do, however, was call out a politician who, like some relic of the church indulgences scheme, would put a price on patriotism. And just like Biden, Friedman, too, reaches the facile conclusion that the only expression of patriotism is for (other) Americans to pay more taxes.
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Tracking Polls Show Different Pictures of Obama vs. McCain
Tweet Share on Facebook October 8, 2008 Comment (72)Has anyone else been struck by what seems to be a rising discrepancy between the various tracking polls? Gallup currently shows Obama +11, and Rasmussen shows Obama +6. But the Obama margin is notably less in Reuters/Zogby (Obama +2) and Hotline (Obama +1), with Battleground (Obama +4) in the middle. This doesn't cast doubt on the Obama lead. All of the tracking polls but Hotline have Obama winning between 47 percent and 52 percent of the vote. All but Gallup have McCain winning 43 percent to 46 percent of the vote. But the Obama margin in the realclearpolitics.com average has been going down. CBS and Democracy Corps, which if anything usually lean just a little to the Democrats, have Obama +3, not a huge lead. Is it possible there's a little more fluidity in this race than we have come to think?
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Palin Did in Fact Draw White Women to the McCain Ticket—Temporarily
Tweet Share on Facebook October 8, 2008 Comment (16)I'd like to respectfully respond to my colleague Morgan, who wrote last week, "The buzz is that John McCain had captured the support of white women because of Sarah Palin. But here's the rub: White women haven't behaved any differently from the general population. They haven't been swinging as wildly as my colleague Bonnie and many others have suggested."
Sorry, "sistah," but the facts as relayed by Politico.com are in stark contrast to the claim that white women were never wooed to the McCain ticket by Sarah Palin's presence.They were indeed:
