http://ca.news.yahoo.com/s/afp/081020/usa/us_voteAFP says the Sunday Gallup daily tracking poll has Obama ahead 52% to 42% and the Rasmussen poll 51% to 45%.
I can't see McCain as standing a chance. If it weren't for racism, this thing wouldn't even be close. I look at it as 8 disastrous years of Republicans in power, a total failure on both the foreign and the domestic fronts and the complete inability of the Republicans to make three key hard sells:
- Obama lacking experience - a tough enough sell from the beginning when all the "experienced" pols had backed the Iraq war, proving that their much-touted "experience did not add up to a hill a beans; and TOTALLY deep-sixed when McCain chose Palin as VP, demonstrating (a) his own lack of judgment and (b) the total hypocrisy of the initial assault on Obama's "lack of experience;"
- Obama as a security threat due to ties to Ayers: nobody buying into it because Ayers' bomb-planting days are long-gone, whether he publicly "repents" or not;
- Obama as racially divisive, based on The Rev. Jeremiah Wright - - a very tough sell because common sense told the voters that Obama and not Wright was the one running for President
While McCain should have been concentrating on what he had to offer the country, rather than on tearing down Obama, there was nothing there to concentrate on; his main claim to fame was as a POW, which is REALLY backward looking and looking not only backward but a
long way back, and a kind of "Duty Honour Country" ethic which most Americans now associate, justly or unjustly, with the disastrous decision to invade Iraq; the kind of mentality that consists of blind obedience to orders and blindly following the flag and the sound of the drum has lost a lot of credit over the past five years. Somehow the negative anti-Obama campaign just reinforced what a lot of voters felt deep down but might not have acknowedged so readily, had the negative campaign not made it all so obvious: the guy really had little, if anything, to offer the country. And what he had, the country either didn't want or didn't need.
The curtain really started into free fall with one very unfortunate yet wholly preventable event: "The fundamentals of the economy are strong" could not possibly have been said at a more inopportune time. Then the totally weird "I won't debate-Yes I will debate" shenanigans, followed by the Colin Powell endorsement, which put the final kibosh on the "security threat/terrorist" argument.
McCain campaign, R.I.P. - the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. But to be fair to McCain, I just don't think ANY Republican could have pulled it off. Just not their year.
