Are the polls stunningly wrong? Is there a McCain upset in the making? It might be, it could be …..

1 comment November 3rd, 2008

The McCain campaign believes it will pull off a stunning upset Tuesday, because polls that show Obama in the lead reflect polling of too many Democrats. Read about it in Politico

The  McCain folks say their own polling shows that the race was within the margin of error as long ago as Friday and that the Arizona senator is pulling ahead in key swing states.

On the campaign trail for the readers in Copenhagen

Add comment September 28th, 2008

Turns out we were not the only reporters on the train back to Chicago. Anna Olsen, who writes for the Sjaellandske Media group in Denmark, was also on board — in coach class.

Olsen, 31, covered Friday’s  presidential debate in Oxford, Miss., for her newspaper and was traveling from Mississippi to Carbondale to catch a bus to St. Louis for Thursday’s vice presidential debate at Washington University.

In addition to covering politics, Olsen also writes about transportation and infrastructure issues, “so my objective is to use only trains and buses, and no cars.” This can be  cumbersome, and sometimes impossible, in car-crazy America, as she learned when trying to find a bus or train to get from Memphis to Oxford. There are none. “I was forced to rent a car,” she said. As for the debate?

“I think it was a tie,” she said of the match-up between Barack Obama and John McCain.

 ”I would have liked more dialogue between the candidates and less posturing. It was not so much a debate as two men bickering at each other. They should have been confronting each other, and they didn’t. For instance, McCain talked about a spending freeze, but Obama didn’t pay any attention to it. That is a major difference between them,” she said.

Olsen said the debate did highlight some major differences between the two men, “and I didn’t expect McCain to do as well as he did, considering  he cancelled it once.”

On the mortage meltdown crisis, “the major difference between the two is that McCain doesn’t want to do any regulation on the financial institutions – until he changed his mind last week — while Obama has six guidelines for the institutions to follow.”

Europeans are paying close attention to this presidential election,  Olsen said, because “the last four to eight years have been catastrophic for U.S. cooperation with Europe, and the world in general. I completely agreed with Obama, you need to sit down and talk to leaders that you don’t necessarily like, or who have a different kind of government than yours.” 

In the debate, McCain “wanted to make sure that the American people knew of his experience in foreign policy, and he threw a lot of strange names of world leaders out there. He made it clear he knew what he was talking about, and he was trying to diminish Obama. But Obama never retaliated. He should have.” 

Olsen is in the U.S. through mid-November. 

Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose

Add comment September 7th, 2008

Barack Obama is running on Change. McCain is running on Change. But as the above headline says, the more things change, the more they remain the same.

Actually, this presidential election is the most traditional I’ve seen in years. Republicans are running on a platform of less government, lower taxes, privatization, less regulation of the economy, free trade, education vouchers, an end to most environmental protection — it’s no accident that veep nominee Sarah Palin hunts wolves from a helicopter. There’s a message there. Take that you tree huggers! And on the foreign front, the United States will build a massive global force to protect global corporate markets — all the while saying we’re building a stronger military to fight international terrorism.

Democrats, though they’re loathe to admit it, are running on a platform of more government, lots more; higher taxes on businesses and the top tier of taxpayers, the very entities that create jobs; mind-numbing regulation of every aspect of our daily lives — except for  abortion, of course; more money for public school teachers, read teacher unions; trade protectionism.

Is this change we can believe in? No, this is the same-old same-old. Barack Obama is Franklin Roosevelt; John McCain is Ronald Reagan.

The slogan for 2008, on both sides should be, “Back to the Future with McBama.”