Archive for October 8th, 2008
October 8th, 2008
Political scientists Tom Holbrook and Jay DeSart have come up with a theory that presidential candidates “generally win states in which they hold a lead in September polls and always win when they lead outside the margin of error.”
On the basis of that model, Holbrook and DeSart project that Barack Obama will win the election with 336 electoral votes to John McCain’s 202 votes.
Holbrook explains the matter HERE (and provides a link to DeSart’s Web page).
October 8th, 2008
Do you know anyone who’s still undecided on how they’ll vote in the presidential election? Well, I don’t.
Public attention to the presidential race has been more intense this year than in any previous campaign season I can recall.
The cable news networks realized many months ago that politics draws a lot of viewers as America prepares to move beyond the Bush era, and they have programmed and marketed themselves accordingly.
By the same token, the media in general have devoted more time and space to the presidential race.
As a result, the vast majority of voters have made their choices by now, and polls show a hardening of positions in that regard.
So who are these nine or 10 percent of likely voters who have yet to make up their minds? How many of them are just habitually indecisive? How many are utterly clueless about politics? How many, as was suggested on “The Daily Show” the other night, racist Democrats struggling with the thought of voting for a black person? How many are so gullible that they always agree with the last political opinion they’ve read or heard?
During their coverage of last night’s debate, several networks focused on groups of undecided voters for signs that some of them were swayed by the event. The comments I heard from a few of these folks after the debate were so obtuse that I couldn’t help but hope that they’ll stay at home on election day for lack of the ability to make a decision one way or the other.
October 8th, 2008
It says HERE that John McCain is bragging about an endorsement he’s received from Leonore Annenberg (above), president and chairman of the Annenberg Foundation.
The foundation, if you don’t know, has ties to the Chicago Annenberg Challenge, an education-reform group with which Barack Obama and 1960’s radical Bill Ayers previously were involved.
So there you have it. McCain is tight with Ayers. And since we don’t know with whom McCain regularly speaks on the phone or regularly dines, there’s no proof that McCain and Ayers aren’t best of friends.
Perhaps McCain, ever the maverick, plans to put Ayers in his Cabinet if he’s elected president.
But, hey, don’t tell Sarah Palin about this. She easily gets confused, and this would get her to babbling incoherently, as she so often does.
October 8th, 2008
All the scientific polls (pay no mind to the pseudo-polls one finds at places like the Drudge Report) show that John McCain lost last night’s debate by a wide margin. But none of them specifically addresses the one point on which Mr. Straight Talk perhaps did himself the most harm.
I refer to the Hail Mary pass he threw in the opening minutes of the debate – a proposal for the government to buy up all the bad mortgages in America, which would cost about $300 billion.
Never mind the practical merits (or lack of them) of this idea. From a purely political standpoint, it’s a disaster, because it weakens McCain’s hold on his conservative base.
Reaction to McCain’s proposal among right-wing bloggers is rabidly negative, as we see HERE and HERE and HERE and HERE.
October 8th, 2008
The content is dishonest, but from a standpoint of style, this TV ad for John McCain is a big cut above average.
The lack of narration, music or visual clutter drives the message home more effectively:
October 8th, 2008
It says HERE that John McCain’s campaign organization is hinting that it’s ready to abandon its futile efforts to smear Barack Obama as a close pal of 1960’s radical Bill Ayers.
The McCain people apparently have recognized that that dog won’t hunt.
There also are indications that there’ll be no campaign offensive featuring Obama’s former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
If all this is true, that leaves McCain with only the real issues to run on. Too bad for him.
UPDATE: Sarah Palin gave a SPEECH this afternoon without mentioning Ayers.
