Apparently Sen. Biden’s knowledge of American history is a bit shaky.
Of course, had Gov. Palin said something like this, the media would be making all sort of accusations about her competency. But given the way that the media covers for anyone with a D next to their name, most people will never here the stupid things that pours freely from Sen. Biden’s craw…
As the situation on Wall Street develops and worries grow about the economy, Sen. McCain already has an effective ad out discussing the issue:
Now, I’m not sure that this problem will be solvable with more regulation—the market is already doing enough to punish those firms that engaged in the trade of “liar loans” in the subprime market. However, McCain is pounding the issue of which candidate is best suited to lead this country in a crisis. When it comes to leadership, McCain has a decisive edge both substantively and in the polls.
The looming financial crisis is based on bipartisan stupidity in the creation of GSEs like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. However, Sen McCain has been on top of this issue for months now. Obama’s pick of Sen. Biden is VP hurts his ability to champion reform—Biden has cozy ties to the banking industry, especially Bank of America/NBNA. McCain and Palin have the opportunity to once again display themselves as the champions of substantive reform rather that the nondescript idea of “change.”
This ad shows that the McCain team can rapidly react to changing circumstances and use them to reinforce their political narratives. The Obama campaign does not seem to have the same ability—at least not that they’ve been able to show. Presidential politics is a game of maneuver, and McCain’s team has some master tacticians. Whether Obama can catch up is anyone’s guess, but going negative and attacking McCain won’t be the way to do it.
Tiny Fey’s impersonation of Palin is so good, it’s almost eerie…
The Minneapolis Star-Tribune‘s Minnesota Poll is infamous for overstating Democratic performance. Whether it is by sampling bias or methodology, the poll has consistently tended to overstate the performance of Democratic candidates in Minnesota.
Which is why, for the Obama campaign, having the Minnesota Poll showing Minnesota dead even should be a major worry.
Political campaigns are all about momentum. If Obama has to shore up support in Minnesota, that means less time and money to keep Pennsylvania, Ohio, Michigan, and other potential swing states in play. That gives McCain the advantage. If Minnesota is competitive, states like Michigan and Wisconsin are in play as well. Obama cannot afford to lose those states if he wants to win. McCain has the momentum, and so far Obama has been unable to wrestle it away from him. If McCain continues to pick up independent voters and Obama continues to flounder, the race could end up being a blowout.
This summer, it was looking like McCain had virtually no chance. Obama had the potential for a massive upset. Today, the electoral map has radically changed. McCain is picking up support in the key states he must hold, like Virginia, Ohio, Florida, and Indiana. He is putting pressure on Obama in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Michigan. If McCain can hold on to Colorado, Nevada, and New Mexico, he can win. If he can do that and peel off one of the “blue” states, Obama will be shut out.
This race keeps getting more and more interesting, and it will come down to whether McCain can hold his momentum through the next few weeks. Politics is continually fluid, and McCain could blow it or Obama could surge ahead. However, the trendlines now clearly favor McCain, and Obama is running a truly competitive race against a candidate who has displayed an astounding knack for knocking Obama off his feet. The idea that this election, which was looking to be a Democratic blowout, is now close goes to show just how good the McCain team has gotten after months of lowered expectations and near disasters.
It seems as though everyone has seized on Barack Obama’s comment about “putting lipstick on a pig” yesterday&mash;and Glenn Reynolds has the links to prove it.
At first, I figured that there was no way that Obama could have been that stupid—he would never be dumb enough to make that big a gaffe. But in context, it does sound like he’s calling Palin a “pig” and then goes on to compare McCain to an “old fish.” That also seems to be the way that the audience interpreted it.
This was an incredibly dumb move by Obama. It was an unforced error, and comments like that are enough to sink a political career. Obama is a gifted rhetorician, but without the crutch of a teleprompter, he makes mistake after mistake after mistake. He’s as gaffe prone as President Bush, and now the media is starting to take notice of this.
Obama’s campaign is making mistakes at the worst time. Not accepting public financing means that he has to do 40 fundraisers this month—time that could have been spent on the campaign trail. What’s worse about that is that the message that a Democratic donor wants to hear is not going to be the message that a swing voter wants. Obama cannot afford to swing to the left now. but his need for cash forces him to play to two audiences while McCain can play to independents.
From the beginning, I’ve said that Obama has never run a truly competitive national race. The bruising primary with Clinton seemed to have shown that he could handle it. Now, I’m beginning to wonder how much of that victory was the collapse of Clinton rather than the skill of Obama. Obama has spent the first part of this week on the defensive, which is not where a candidate should be. He’s making errors, looking foolish, and undercutting his claim to be something more than your typical politician.
Obama’s idiotic “pig” comment doesn’t itself mean all that much. What it does suggest is that Obama’s mouth is becoming a problem for him—and with less than 60 days to go in this election, a major unforced error can be fatal.
UPDATE: The overly whiny way that Obama is handling this situation doesn’t suit him. Comparing this to “Swift Boating?” Is that any way to make this controversy go away?
Obama is clearly rattled now, and coming off as desperate and whiny doesn’t make Obama look like a strong leader. Obama does not play well on the defensive, and it shows.
A recent poll in Michigan shows Obama with the slenderest of leads, and many undecided independent voters. If Michigan goes to McCain, Obama is going to have a very difficult time making up for its electoral votes. If Michigan and Pennsylvania swing to McCain, it’s over for Obama. That scenario is unlikely, but it’s well within the realm of possibility.
McCain and Palin have a chance to reach out to the blue-collar Reagan Democrat voters that have always been skeptical of Obama. McCain is already peeilng away some Democratic voters, and if that trend holds, Obama is in severe trouble.
This race is very much up in the air, and many key states are close. However, the momentum is on McCain’s side, and if they are able to capitalize on that momentum in the weeks ahead, it is possible that close states like Wisconsin, Michigan, and Pennsylvania could shift to McCain. If that happens, even Obama gains in Colorado and New Mexico won’t be enough to save his chances at the White House.
The first batch of post-RNC polls are out, and they contain good news for John McCain.. In the Gallup Tracking poll, McCain is up 3% against Obama. In the Rassmussen Tracking poll, McCain is tied 48% to 48%.
These polls show that McCain did get a bounce from the RNC, and that this race is very fluid. It would not be surprising if these numbers get better for McCain by mid-week as weekend polls sometimes undercount Republicans.
I am going to go off on a limb and predict that Obama will underperform his polling numbers—just as he did in New Hampshire in January. I believe that there is a strong “bandwagon” effect among Obama voters and that McCain will actually peel away some of the Hillary voters that have “come home” to the Democrats after the DNC.
Watch the swing state vote—states like Colorado, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Michigan will decide this election. Obama needs some of the key Western states to win. McCain must take Ohio and Florida to win. Obama has to hold all of Kerry’s states and peel off enough electoral votes for the red states to win.
If Pennsylvania goes to McCain, Obama is toast. He is unlikely to pull enough additional electoral votes to make up for that loss. If I were McCain, I’d be having Sarah Palin circling the Great Lakes states while McCain pulls Colorado, Nevada, and possibly New Mexico from Obama.
This race is completely up in the air. McCain has taken some of the wind out of Obama’s sails. He has an opportunity to run as an “agent of change” and beat the prevailing political climate. Obama is now on the defensive, and could lose. The debates will be critical, and the next two months will be some of the most exciting in American politics yet.
UPDATE: The latest Gallup/USA Today tracking poll has even better news for McCain: a lead of 10% in a survey of likely voters. That poll is likely an outlier, but there’s little doubt that McCain has gotten a bounce from his convention, and that Obama’s lead has evaporated.
UPDATE: Today (Sept. 8), McCain has a 3.2% lead in the RealClearPolitics average. All the major polls show the race either tied, or with McCain in the lead. There’s no doubt that McCain got a bounce from the convention, and that it was a substantial one. The question will be whether he can make the best of that momentum into Election Day.
This is surprising to me, but it appears that the preliminary TV ratings for McCain’s speech last night were higher than Obama’s. Granted, the numbers could change, but I didn’t think the numbers would even be close.
Gov. Palin’s speech had less than one million fewer viewers than Obama’s speech, but was carried on six networks to Obama’s ten. Obama had just over 37 million viewers to Palin’s over 36 million. Palin’s speech was the most-watched speech by a Vice Presidential contender in history.
What does this mean? Obviously the more viewers the better. Obama got fawning press and put on a great show. McCain’s speech was natural, and I have a feeling that it will play better with independent voters. If so, it is quite possible that McCain will get a stronger-than-expected convention bounce in the next set of polls. As with Obama, we have to wait until late next week to see if the bounce lasts, but McCain and Palin have undoubtedly exceeded expectations. If McCain outperforms Obama in the debates and reaches out to independent voters, this race could shift dramatically in the 60 days until Election Day.
John McCain will never be a great orator. He’s no Obama, neither is he a Sarah Palin. But last night’s speech wasn’t about lofty rhetoric: it was about John McCain being John McCain. There was no attempt to gild the lily: instead McCain had the wisdom to realize that the only way he can win is to change the nature of this race.
Between Sen. McCain’s speech and Gov. Palin’s tour de force, this election is no longer what it was before the convention began.
Before, the election was a referendum on Obama. McCain seemed to be fighting a battle to introduce enough doubts in voter’s minds about Obama to win. This was unlikely to work, and probably would have resulted in a narrow Obama win.
Today, this election is about something different: it is about a clash of visions. John McCain has taken up the mantle of a kind of political populism. He is running against Washington D.C. and the political establishment. That is a battle he can win.
He did the right thing. The approval rating of Congress is abysmal. People are disenchanted with the politics as usual. Obama was gaining traction because he was a political outsider with a great gift for oratory and a masterful command of rhetoric. He offered a nondescript vision of “change” and “hope” that was politically compelling, especially to the disenchanted left.
McCain had to offer something different. In the end, what he’s offering is more in line with the American spirit than what Obama is. Obama wants to give you vague hope and change; McCain wants to go to Washington and throw the bums out. This is a “throw the bums out” election.
This election can be 1992 or 1994, depending on what party can best bring a vision of where the country should go in the future.
Obama wants to argue that McCain is Bush 2.0. If that’s the best they can do, then they will lose. That argument won’t fly after this convention, where we saw two styles that were vastly different than that of Bush and Cheney. McCain’s story is so different that Bush’s that it is going to be difficult, if not impossible, for the Obama team to try to paint them as mirror images. It is not a message that will resonate with voters, and it just sounds desperate. It’s the same strategy that the Republicans tried in 2006 when they tried to tag every Democrat with the “dangerous liberal” tag. It didn’t work, because the Republicans never presented a real agenda.
The Republican National Convention was a success. McCain leaves this great state with a political powerhouse as a running mate, an energized base, and a new message. That’s what he needed to do.
This convention lacked the flash and polish of the Democratic Convention in Denver, but it is memorable not for its showmanship, but for producing a new political star. People will remember this convention, and this could very well be the week that leads McCain to another come-from-behind victory in November.
We just saw the first female President of the United States give the first major speech of her national career.
Sarah Palin is the most natural political talent I’ve ever seen. Tonight, she very well may have won this election. She was strong, engaging, powerful, and unafraid. She went after Obama with the glee of a happy warrior. She set the tone for this campaign in a way that was strategically brilliant. She put the country on notice that if she didn’t know much about foreign policy, she’s a very quick study.
Her approach was natural, she spoke directly to the people. She is not the lofty rhetorician that Barack Obama is—but her style is uniquely American. Only she could have delivered that speech.
Throughout this election, Republicans have been looking for the next Ronald Reagan—another Great Communicator.
We found her.