If the clock could be turned back four months, Hillary and not Obama would be the nominee. Many of his delegate gains were accumulated before the Rev. Wright issue became fully known to the American people and the Democrats are now stuck with him. The fundamentals will help him as well as his ability to give a great speech, but, in the end, I believe a majority of Americans will go for McCain over a flawed, far left ideologue whose past long term associations make it clear he has not earned the privilege of being our President. McCain has to make the case that Obama’s policies on taxation and energy will make the economy worse, not better.
In the area of energy for example, given the shortages we are facing and the increased prices that are resulting, if Republicans ever get their collective heads out of their you know where, they would hang organizations like the Sierra Club around the necks of their Democrat opponents. They should expound on the difference between environmental activism which has led to many positive steps being taken to protect the environment and environmental extremism practiced by organizations like the Sierra Club whose campaign contributions heavily support Obama and other Democrats. Environmental extremism has played a very significant role in getting us to where we are by blocking any attempts to increase supply through nuclear energy and increased use of fossil fuels which, like it or not, will be our primary source of energy for many years to come. Solar and wind power only accounts for 1% of our energy needs and neither will ever provide sufficient amounts of energy for automobiles, aircraft, trucks and trains. Conservation and improved automobile mileage, while important, will not offset the need for more fossil fuel energy supplies by themselves because worldwide demands due to population and business growth alone will outstrip any savings.
Because of the environmental extremism of organizations like the Sierra Club and their Democrat allies, we are literally fueling the bank accounts of our terrorist enemies in the Middle East, not to mention US hating dictators like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, at the expense of our standard of living and economy. Democrat policies to inhibit the increase in energy supplies and to precipitously abandon Iraq with the resulting destabilization of the Middle East will do more to increase oil/gasoline prices, damage our economy and weaken our national security than any external enemy could hope to accomplish. Let’s hope McCain and other Republican candidates can provide the wake-up call that is needed before next November.
If they do, it could help turn the tide in their favor because Americans, more than any other issue, vote their pocket books.
Hillary’s averaging only one-tenth of a point behind Obama nationally, even as the media urge her drop out. She must be the strongest Democratic primary “loser” ever and Obama the weakest “winner.”
Much depends on what voters will learn about the candidates and the issues. Remember how the partisan and corrupt mainstream news media jumped all over the report, a few days before the 2000 election, that George Bush had been arrested in Kennebunkport for drunk driving in 1976? Remember how they leaped on the CBS claims regarding obviously phony National Guard memos? (The people who put the memos up at CBS and a defender who wrote for Columbia Journalism Review didn’t have a typographic clue: it took only a few moments to spot an “r: sitting under the arm of an “f” in “from” in the 19 May 1972 alleged memo, an impossibility for an office typewriter.)
However, has your local newspaper reported the sizzling remarks of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, at the National Press Club and elsewhere, and Sen. Obama’s long association with that firebrand? Probably not, or probably briefly, somewhere far from Page One, where the other stories likely ran. Re: that association, we have two possibilities. Obama is a lousy judge of people and their views, which disqualifies him for the Presidency, or, and I think more likely, the graduate of Harvard Law School, who is mentally quick in debates and interviews, stuck with the reverend because the association suited his political interests, and he has yet to tell the truth about that, which also disqualifies him for the job he seeks.
Despite the fact that Obama continues to babble about being opposed to people seeking to divide Americans--again, remember his long and close association with Rev. Wright--lots of people will disregard the information he and Rev. Wright have provided that illuminate Obama’s lousy character and integrity. And the news media will do what they have to do to define the issues and the campaign so as to favor Obama.
Sen. McCain may be only slightly better than George W. Bush in battling Democratic contenders and issue claims. Unless someone on the Net, with help from talk radio and a few editorial pages, can make the case against Obama and the policy positions Democrats in politics and the press favor and get the attention of enough voters, we ought to have an Obama Administration.
It’s not easy to utter a terminal “a” followed by an initial “a.” Collapsing the two words together avoids that problem and gives one what might be an apt description for the next four years. The new word also plays on Obama’s ambitions for the nation, which strike this opponent as resembling those of Fidel Castro for Cuba in 1960. (Castro also had useful idiots in the press to help him gain early acceptance.) So what might we have in the next four years?:
. . . In the area of energy for example, given the shortages we are facing and the increased prices that are resulting, if Republicans ever get their collective heads out of their you know where, they would hang organizations like the Sierra Club around the necks of their Democrat opponents. . . .
Let’s hope McCain and other Republican candidates can provide the wake-up call that is needed before next November.
If they do, it could help turn the tide in their favor because Americans, more than any other issue, vote their pocket books.
I agree entirely. Please see my comments in a few posts in this thread:
IF John McCain were to get out front of the energy issue, by (1) renouncing ‘global warming/climate change’ alarmism and (2) advocating aggressive development of domestic energy resources--oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear (including drilling, refineries, breeder nukes, coal-to-petroleum, etc., etc.),
THEN this position would be welcomed by the vast majority of Americans, who by now are sick and tired of the defeatist, negative, anti-growth, pro-taxation, neo-Luddite Democrat/enviro-whacko positions, which have dominated our energy policy for four decades now.
BUT, Sen. McCain seems to be mired in that left-wing tripe. Someone has to get to him, tell him ‘global warming’ has been cancelled, and that Americans do not want this country to stagnate while India and China (and now Brazil) speed ahead full steam.
Someone has to get to McCain—maybe Fred Thompson?
If everyone on this board were to write and call the campaign, maybe that would make a difference, too.
. . . In the area of energy for example, given the shortages we are facing and the increased prices that are resulting, if Republicans ever get their collective heads out of their you know where, they would hang organizations like the Sierra Club around the necks of their Democrat opponents. . . .
Let’s hope McCain and other Republican candidates can provide the wake-up call that is needed before next November.
If they do, it could help turn the tide in their favor because Americans, more than any other issue, vote their pocket books.
I agree entirely. Please see my comments in a few posts in this thread:
IF John McCain were to get out front of the energy issue, by (1) renouncing ‘global warming/climate change’ alarmism and (2) advocating aggressive development of domestic energy resources--oil, coal, natural gas, nuclear (including drilling, refineries, breeder nukes, coal-to-petroleum, etc., etc.),
THEN this position would be welcomed by the vast majority of Americans, who by now are sick and tired of the defeatist, negative, anti-growth, pro-taxation, neo-Luddite Democrat/enviro-whacko positions, which have dominated our energy policy for four decades now.
BUT, Sen. McCain seems to be mired in that left-wing tripe. Someone has to get to him, tell him ‘global warming’ has been cancelled, and that Americans do not want this country to stagnate while India and China (and now Brazil) speed ahead full steam.
Someone has to get to McCain—maybe Fred Thompson?
If everyone on this board were to write and call the campaign, maybe that would make a difference, too.
No. McCain has no shot here. McCain could dig up GEORGE Romney and he’d still lose Michigan.
It didn’t help when during the primary McCain told Michigan’s manufacturing unemployed that their jobs were gone and they needed to get over it.
He has no shot.
What’s the matter with Michigan? Do they expect the U.S. president to ban all automobile imports? Create some Michigan Relief program? Sign an executive order forcing American manufacturers to magically re-create those jobs and hire everyone back at $80k/year?
When people start thinking about Obama’s likely Supreme Court Appointments: Angela Davis, Lani Guinier, and Jamie Gorelick, etc., they are bound to have sober second thoughts about putting him in the White House. I believe many Democrats who voted for Obama in the primaries will not vote for him in the general election. They are really thrilled by the nomination of a black man for president and their own part in it, but realism will kick in before they actually vote to put such a dangerous radical in office.
According to Leip, state polls give McCain an advantage over Obama 237 to 217, while they give Clinton an advantage over McCain 237 to 222.
The states Obama loses to McCain that Clinton would win are: Arkansas, Ohio, West Virginia and Florida. Pennsylvania would become a tossup. Not hard to figure out what goes on here: Obama has less support than Clinton among “downscale” whites and also hispanics and Jews.
This would seem to make things easy for McCain, except Obama picks up some states too: Oregon, Washington, Hawaii, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin. Here the operative force is not blacks, clearly, but upscale whites, suburbanites, campus flakes and midwestern progressive types, who think voting for Obama will absolve them of the country’s racial sins or that it’s just simply too cool for words or whatever.
Now if you give McCain some of the “tossup” states--states I think he will win, I don’t care what the polls say (North Dakota! Nebraska! Indiana! South Carolina! )--that gets McCain up to 264.
So if Obama can hold Penn and Michigan and take from the GOP New Mexico, Nevada and Colorado (they already give him Iowa), he wins just barely, 274 to 264. He would do so by preventing McCain from picking up any Kerry states, except NH (4 votes), and by taking the Bush states of Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Iowa (26 votes). On the other hand, if McCain won Colorado that would take him over Obama, barely, 273 to 265. If he took Nevada, there would be a tie 269, 269.
McCain must win Florida, and he will be campaigning a helluva a lot in Ohio and Pennsylvania in the northeast and Colorado and Nevada out west. He might have a shot at Wisconsin, but that usually seems to slip away at the end (vote fraud?). It looks basically like the same old thing, with McCain possibly making some inroads in the Rust Belt and Obama in the Mountain West and Plains. Of course, we’ll have to see what people are feeling about the economy and the war in six months. The Dems feel “the facts on the ground” have guaranteed them victory this year.
If McCain falters (bumbles economic and miltray questions, gets cranky, etc.) he could lose Ohio, certainly, maybe Virginia, North Carolina, Florida, Montana (this assumes Obama holding down hispanic and Jewish losses and reaches nirvana level turnout from blacks and white affluents). I think states like SC and Mississippi are safe, despite the large black populations, because the GOP white turnout will increase with it. This would get Obama to 352 and McCain down to 186, about what Clinton did in the 90s.
If Obama falters (comes of remote and aloof to non-elite whites and hispanics, continues to be seen as tied to black radicals and leftist white terrorists and his wife, comes off not credible as commander-in-chief), he could lose the West Coast, Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, New Jersey, Delaware (Leip has him a bit weak in Massachusetts too, but I’ll never believe it), meaning he would get about 99 electoral votes, about as bad as Dukakis. Obama getting less than 100 electoral votes would be a pleasing rebuke to the Kos Kids and other American patriots like George Soros and Arianna Huffington, but I wouldn’t bet the farm on it yet.
The trouble with the argument based on the supposed “fundamentals” is that its conclusion—that McCain is in a deep hole to start—is at odds with every national poll conducted for months. As of today, in Gallup, Rasmussen and others, he’s essentially tied with Obama. Obama performed best in these match-ups a few months back when he was less well known to the electorate and McCain was still duking it out with other Republicans. Even then, however, McCain matched up much better against both Obama and Clinton than Romney and other GOP rivals.
Polls are a snap shot of the present, to be sure, but that still means that at the present time, McCain is not in any hole at all—lousy economy, the war and Bush’s terrible approval ratings notwithstanding.
What’s more, and perhaps even more important than these national match-ups, McCain is highly competitive with Obama in virtually every certain “battleground” state (FL, OH, etc.)—either ahead or even or only a few points behind—as well as in quite a few states Obama absolutely must win, particulary, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
These polling numbers speak for themselves and it makes no sense to disregard their importance because of the so-called “fundamentals” or the results of “generic” polls (no one votes for anonymous).
This is not to say that McCain doesn’t have a tough fight ahead—but so does Obama. If you were to bet now, you’d be well advised to bet on a close outcome one way or the other.
This is not to say that McCain doesn’t have a tough fight ahead—but so does Obama.
...a fight Obama will certainly lose.
He’s not “ready” to be President and never will be.
If he’s the nominee, he will lose and lose big, which is why I think the DNC will go with Hillary (although it wouldn’t surprise me if she puts him on the bottom of the ticket to please “his” people).
If you were to bet now, you’d be well advised to bet on a close outcome one way or the other.
I don’t think this one will be close at all;
McCain will win in a landslide.
THEN this position would be welcomed by the vast majority of Americans, who by now are sick and tired of the defeatist, negative, anti-growth, pro-taxation, neo-Luddite Democrat/enviro-whacko positions, which have dominated our energy policy for four decades now.
BUT, Sen. McCain seems to be mired in that left-wing tripe. Someone has to get to him, tell him ‘global warming’ has been cancelled, and that Americans do not want this country to stagnate while India and China (and now Brazil) speed ahead full steam.
/Mr Lynn
However McCain is a left wing type. He NOT a Marxist like BO, he is NOT a total socialist like HRC. he IS a MODERATE democrat - to much reaching across the aisle I guess. He just never got around to changing his party from R to D -
That is the simplest explanation for it. He firmly believes it, just as he believes in full amnesty and citizenship for illegals, they are all G_D’s children and have a right to be here.
I gotta go buy more popcorn - this is too good.
Sigh. You’re probably right. But I’m convinced that the American people in general are no fans of doom, gloom, pessimism, and defeatism. Obambi does a good job of pretending that he’s the candidate of optimism: “Hope, change,” and “Yes we can!” Can he pull that wool over America’s eyes? In reality he’s an agent of the radical left, which sees nothing good in America. But so far he’s managed to fool the young and the chic (and those who will vote based on skin color and nothing else).
It’s going to be up to John McCain to
(a) demonstrate to the American people that Obambi is a fraud, a Pied Piper about to lead them off the edge of a cliff;
(b) demonstrate the he, McCain, is the candidate of optimism, growth, a bright and free future.
To do this he needs to take an aggressive pro-growth, pro-energy-development, pro-free-enterprise stance. McCain can’t counter Obambi’s alluring baritone and seductive rhetoric with speeches of his own; he needs to advocate policies that show up Obambi’s utter contempt for free enterprise and American accomplishment, for freedom, liberty, and the American dream.
“The Left,” he should say, “of which Obama is a prime representative, wants to drag America down to the level of the Third World, to make you dependent upon government handouts and government handouts and government schools and government healthcare, by taxing and taxing and taxing the hard-working people and businesses that make this country great. The Left wants to tax every little bit of energy you use, instead of making more and making it cheaper. The Left wants us to retreat behind the oceans and stop trading with the rest of the world. The Left says it is nighttime in American, and we have to turn off the lights and go to sleep.”
“That is not the America I want to see. I’m with Ronald Reagan. I believe that it’s morning in America, and that her best days are before her. The sun is shining, and the engines of progress are just beginning to turn. The 21st century is going to be the American century. We will lead the world to new heights of prosperity and enduring peace. And I want to be the one to start the journey.”
That’s what John McCain should say. Is he up to it?
Ain’t no way that happens. This is Hillary’s only shot at becoming the first woman President and she is not going to give it up, it will have to be ripped from her and in the process the DNC will be ripped as well.
Saying it doesn’t make it so. The fundamentals you are displaying are a strategy based on wishful thinking. That breaks heavily in the Dems’ favor.
