Ok, Ok! 
I gotcha!
Yes, Obama can beat McCain. In the primary races he has many times created double digit shifts (polls vs. election results) with a couple weeks of campaigning. He has been dealing with both Hillary and McCain taking pot shots at him, fighting a war on two fronts as it were, and coming out bruised but still swinging. Hillary is NOT closing the delegate gap much at all, and certainly not at a rate that will cost Obama the nomination. Obama has been going quite soft on McCain…hurting him doesn’t help with the immediate goal, and indeed could end up helping Hillary’s “electability” diatribe.
When (OK, given her recent history, I guess I should say “if”) Hillary drops out of the race, there will be a sea change in the outlook for the November election. McCain has painted himself into a spending limit corner, and Obama will be sharing the summer airwaves only with the pubbie 528s. (unless McCain really wants to be rightfully tarred for violating the very law that bears his name!). Hillary wouldn’t have that advantage, as her campaign is so soaked in red ink that “CSI” crime scenes look tame by comparison. Hillary has been spending every cent she can beg, borrow, or screw vendors out of, yet Obama is slowly but surely building a war chest to unload on McCain once his party’s nomination is secure. Hillary crowed about “winning” PA even though Obama outspent her…Here’s a clue dearheart: The fact that he COULD outspend you (the candidate with ALL the big money behind her) should tell you something.
After this primary, the Democrat’s nominee can look forward to a significant convention surge. The long since chosen GOP nominee not so much. IF Hillary carries her bid all the way to Denver, the convention will be the most closely watched in four decades…but even if she quits, the now primary wearied Obama backers will be re-energized like they haven’t been since super-Tuesday.
Also consider what is going on with McCain. He is currently being compared to ???. The pollsters are going for hypothetical, but at this point neither Obama not Clinton is a real life alternative. I was a McCain fan as recently as 6 mos. ago. I remembered the McCain of 2000. In the intervening 8 years he has abandoned or outright reversed himself on every single issue that gave me a reason to like him. The only thing missing would be to have George and Barbara Bush officially adopt him as a son.
My take is that McCain won’t do as well against EITHER Hillary or Obama as the current polling suggests…but Obama has gained, and Hillary lost ground in pretty much every contest in this election. Hillary can most likely still beat McCain, but Obama can enjoy a landslide.
Here’s what worries me:
Look at the early primary wins. More liberal states, solid blue states, went for HRC. The less liberal states, the red and purple states tended to go for Obama. And that was as it should be, because Obama is the slightly less liberal of the two candidates. He, like Bill Clinton, is willing to compromise to actually get things done. That means starting out closer to the center.
In an effort to get HRC to be the Dem candidate, the GOP has managed to paint Obama as the more liberal candidate. And now we’re getting Obama wins in blue states and Clinton wins in red states. Not all, obviously. PA is slightly more blue than red - it’s really for the most part Philadelphia vs. the rest of the state, as I understand it, and Obama took North Carolina, which I assume is red. But now Clinton is the hero of the working class, and Obama is winning in the most liberal circles.
If the GOP can do this is just a few weeks, what can they do to either Democratic candidate?
I’ve said it many times before, and I’ll say it again: Karl Rove is the most dangerous man in the country. And the Dems can’t even come up with a Karl Rove of our own, because even if one exists, s/he will probably not be as utterly devoid of principle as Rove - and the Dems hopefully wouldn’t allow it even if s/he were. I feel entirely certain that Edwards would not have, and somewhat assured that Obama would not (although I don’t know about his people - they might keep it from him). HRC has been a politico for many years, and while I respect and admire her in many ways (and think she would have made a good president), I’m not sure what she couldn’t close her eyes to in a campaign. But at this point we haven’t got a Rove even if we had the will to use him (which I hope <mostly> we don’t).
Can you give me a specific example of this? Either an issue on which he’s said he’ll compromise or an issue on which he has, in fact, crossed over?
Thanks.
Your analysis is based on the assumption that Clinton’s popularity in blue states is attributed to Obama being painted as more liberal by the GOP. That may be a factor, but I don’t think it’s a big one. Clinton is the hero of the “working class”, I suspect, not because she is seen as more politically conservative but largely because she has been playing the elitist card for all it’s worth. She has capitialized on the same cultural, socioeconomic, and rural vs. urban divisions that hurt Kerry’s campaign. The situation with Wright certainly hasn’t helped, either. Neither has Obama’s race and somewhat exotic origins.
I don’t think the GOP can be faulted much. I think they are saving their ammo for the general.
His plan for health care is less ambitious than HRC’s (it would not require all individuals to have health care plans), which would by law be truly universal. He has not said he’d compromise or cross over, but he’s starting off with a more achievable goal. Probably being to the left of both of them, I’d prefer the more aggressive plan, but recognize that if anything is going to happen at all, it will have to be acceptable, or at least tolerable, on the other side of the aisle. (Frankly, if I were dictator, I’d institute a single-payer plan for everyone, like Canada. Doctors would be perfectly welcome to practice outside the system, but would receive no reimbursement from the health care plan. But that will never pass while the insurance and pharmaceutical companies are as politically powerful as they are, and I’m sure a lot of you would disagree as well.)
Please bear in mind that I am an Obama supporter and voted for him in the NJ primary. I am not attacking him. One of the factors that decided me in favor of him was that I feel he can work with the opposition in Congress without offending them. The degree of (to my mind, unwarranted) Hillary hatred in this country and the fact that she is in fact a quite aggressive person makes me think that this would be less true for her.
I wouldn’t necessarily call it “crossing over”, more like reaching out or joining together with, but I posted several examples from his current Senate career, here. There are a couple more listed here, and more detail about his role in the most sweeping death penalty legislation ever passed while he was an Illinois Senator, here.
Just looking at the electoral map, I just don’t see how Obama could win over McCain. It seems, the Obama camp’s thesis is that Obama is much more competitive than Hillary in the south. Even granting that, there is no showing, not by history nor by current polls that he will ever take these states - no matter how much more competitive he is than Hillary in them. OTOH, McCain opens up a lot of traditionally Democratic States with Obama as the Democratic nominee. There is an analysis out there that even shows that if McCain takes OR, Obama can take PA, FL, OH and IA (and that would be very hard for him to do) and still lose.
And here, we’re just talking about polls. We haven’t even introduced, Wright, Ayers, Rezko, bittergate, his fictional autobiography and his scant legislative record into the mix. There’s just too much to play with, the RNC, I believe, is just dying to run against him.
Well, there’s current polls showing him within 3 points in both North Carolina and Virginia. That’s within the margin of error and certainly competitive. And that’s not counting that Obama’s numbers are ‘artifically’ held down by the nomination fight – even McCain has warned that once the Democrats settle on a candidate, we’ll see a notable shift in the polls.
I said it back in March that once Obama is alone, and Hillary is full throttle supporting him [or at least acting like she is] then Obama’s numbers will surge. Mark this post, because we will be able to come back and refer to it as being accurate.
Anduril I think you are grossly mischaractorizing what Obama is going to do. But for now that has to remain conjecture, but we shall see what actually happens and I think we’ll see poll numbers higher than expected in Obamas favor.
[Hijack]This last is a very important corollary to the motto of The Straight Dope.[/Hijack]
There is zero chance that McCain will possibly take OR. Rasmussen polled OR on 5/7: Obama won by 14%, Clinton by 6%. Over the last few months, Obama has consistently beaten McCain by an average of 8% in OR, which has been erratically increasing. Clinton has lost by 2% on average, though she’s won 3 of the last 4 times.
Obama has the West Coast firmly sewn up. He also makes the Mountain West competitive, polling higher than Clinton in UT, ID (neither of which he has much of a chance of actually winning, but still), SD, ND, WY, MT, NE (where he could actually get a vote or two, given how they award their electoral votes), CO, (which he wins and she loses), NM, NV, TX, KS, and IA. In nearly all of these states, McCain’s margin of victory over Obama is substantially smaller than over Clinton, with double digit decreases in many cases. Of the states that are not in Appalachia or adjacent to AR, she does better in NH, FL…and yeah, that’s pretty much it.
I think he has a much greater capability to open up states that have traditionally been considered “Safe Republican”, and the reason for this is two- or threefold: he’s spent a lot of time and money setting up organizations in states that don’t usually go blue, and that pays off long-term, as we’ve seen in the last couple of special elections in strong Republican territory that have gone the other way; Republican politicians and pundits have not been teaching their base to hate Obama for the last 20 years, so he is a lot more appealing to fringe Republicans who don’t like how people like George W. Bush and Mitch McConnell have been changing what their party stands for; once again, he’s competing in all states, not dismissing the ones that usually have a margin of victory larger than 10% as unimportant.