If you haven't read Gerard Baker of the London Times and his hilarious satire of Sen. Obama's world salvation rock tour, you've been in a hole someplace or perhaps have been up above the treeline with Gregg.
Read it first to enjoy the prose. Then enjoy listening to Baker reading it as a narrative accompanying video of Obama on World Tour.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
McCain is very much in it
This should by all rights be a Democratic equivalent of 1984 or 1988 for the Democrats -- a blow-out that would put McCain's name alongside Mondale and Dukakis in the collective American political memory.
Conventional wisdom has been that Sen. McCain would have to run a campaign of W-esque perfection in order even to be in the game at all. And yet, in spite of a campaign that has, to put it kindly, been less than perfect, Sen. McCain is very much in it. He has never trailed by much in any poll, and the most recent Gallup poll -- an outlier, to be sure -- put him in a narrow lead.
Perhaps the most interesting finding in the most recent Rasmussen tracking poll is that the number of undecided voters seems to be growing, and that 33% of those undecided voters are Democrats, while only 19% are Republicans.
This bodes well for McCain, since it indicates that the Republican base is more solidified in their determination to vote for him than might have been expected. Of course, McCain is only a Tom Ridge, a Mitt Romney, or a Joe Lieberman away from blowing that unity to smithereens, but for now it remains true that unless McCain sticks his finger in the collective eye of a major constituency of the conservative base, Republicans will be very united this fall against Barack Obama. This should prove true in Montana no less than anywhere else.
Many Republican conservatives may not find Sen. McCain to be their ideal potential President. But in 2008, he still looks like the only guy we had in the stable who ever had a chance at winning.
It is up to McCain to make his case to the swing independent voters and the Democrats who voted in droves for Hillary Clinton's (quickly invented) rural/working class populist message. Maybe it is time for Tim Pawlenty.
Conventional wisdom has been that Sen. McCain would have to run a campaign of W-esque perfection in order even to be in the game at all. And yet, in spite of a campaign that has, to put it kindly, been less than perfect, Sen. McCain is very much in it. He has never trailed by much in any poll, and the most recent Gallup poll -- an outlier, to be sure -- put him in a narrow lead.
Perhaps the most interesting finding in the most recent Rasmussen tracking poll is that the number of undecided voters seems to be growing, and that 33% of those undecided voters are Democrats, while only 19% are Republicans.
This bodes well for McCain, since it indicates that the Republican base is more solidified in their determination to vote for him than might have been expected. Of course, McCain is only a Tom Ridge, a Mitt Romney, or a Joe Lieberman away from blowing that unity to smithereens, but for now it remains true that unless McCain sticks his finger in the collective eye of a major constituency of the conservative base, Republicans will be very united this fall against Barack Obama. This should prove true in Montana no less than anywhere else.
Many Republican conservatives may not find Sen. McCain to be their ideal potential President. But in 2008, he still looks like the only guy we had in the stable who ever had a chance at winning.
It is up to McCain to make his case to the swing independent voters and the Democrats who voted in droves for Hillary Clinton's (quickly invented) rural/working class populist message. Maybe it is time for Tim Pawlenty.
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