Obama Voters: Chill - He's No Fool

Great Debates
1

I have a friend in California and she is (quite seriously) planning to move to Europe if Obama loses. She is about ready to have a coronary from reading polls and watching CNN like some political crack whore. It is all I can do to call her occasionally to try to lower her blood pressure.

As I have told her:

  1. Obama just went through a bitter Primary Campaign that looked like he could lose several times…and finally winning over Hillary was no walk in the park.
  2. Despite dire predictions by the NY Times just a week ago that he was hurting for funds, Obama raised $66 million dollars in August! He has close to $100 million for the campaign so far and we haven’t even hit the September tally. We can only imagine what is going to pour in this October! Supposedly, he raised $10 million alone on the day after Pain’s speech at the RNC.
  3. We haven’t had a single debate from the candidates yet…that will set the talking heads wagging and I have no doubt Obama will do quite well, as will Biden.
  4. As many have mentioned, polls at this stage of the game are not historically all that accurate and a few weeks, or days, can make a lot of difference.
  5. Money talks…did I mention Obama has a nice war chest and will be raking in more as the election nears? Do you really think he is keeping it in a savings account simply to accrue interest? Or perhaps they have a plan?
  6. Every reporter who has ever been to an Obama headquarters is amazed at the single-minded dedication, and vast numbers, of people working on their computers to get donations (they have done very well so far) and working on registration of voters (they have done very well so far) and planning on getting out the vote (my guess is they will do a good job there as well).
  7. Just going by the voter turnout during the Primaries, the Democrats seem willing to crawl over broken glass to vote this year…
  8. Did I mention that Obama has enough money to smack down every bullshit attempt to distract voters, especially in swing states?
  9. Obama is simply the best candidate Americans have had in a very long time.
  10. Obama is nobody’s fool. Take a deep breath, donate if you can, volunteer if you have time, but chill…in election terms, November is about a year away.
2

Obama is nobody’s fool- but the voters certainly are. The McCain camp has decided that facts are entirely irrelevant and their ads are designed to frighten and/or misinform people into voting against Obama. A significant number believe that Obama will raise their taxes, in spite of all the independent analyses that show that they would benefit more from Obama’s policies than McCain’s. A lot of people still believe he is Muslim (as if that should make any difference) AND still hold him personally reponsible for words his Christian pastor said, taken wholly out of context. A lot of people describe William Ayers as a terrorist without having the slightest idea of what he was accused of and how tenous his connection with Obama is. Now they’re going ga-ga over a person entirely unqualified to be vice president who has show a history of abuse of power, sort of like a Dick Cheney with a sex change. I hope the debates matter and that people actually listen to what they say. If the question is “what is two plus two?”, Obama might say something like “Well assuming that you’re talking about real positive integers and that both twos are known with sufficient accuracy and that the base of the numbering system is 10, although my answer would be true for any base greater than four, the answer, again with the assumptions I made, is four”. McCain would pound the podium and shout “THREE” and win the debate. Americans prefer simple and wrong to nuanced and correct.

3

Thanks for starting this thread. You’ve got no many people I’ve had to talk off the ceiling.

4

Unless the Democrats wake up and find their gun for this gunfight instead of the peashooter they’re using at the moment, I fear your 10 points count for very little.

5

This should be tattooed onto the left palm of Democratic candidates, so that they can look at it to remind themselves of it during every debate and town hall meeting. Simple and forceful answers are best in a political debate.

6

I’ve been saying this for a while. Palin’s bump has peaked. Now that her New Candidate Smell has worn off, the press is starting to get pissed that she’s not making herself available to them at all, so the stories aren’t going to get friendlier. Both the NYT and the Washington Post had hit pieces on her this weekend.

The press has even picked up on the McCain campaign’s overall dishonesty, and they’re not mincing a lot of words about it. They’re not even using the whole “Dishonesty, distortions abound in the race for the White House” dodge–they’re actually calling McCain out.

We shouldn’t be overconfident, but we should be confident.

7

You’ve got that very right.

Listening to Obama the last few weeks, I have become increasingly frustrated at his long-winded intellectual answers. I get him, but I don’t think voters in the swing states do get him, hence the snickering talk among the hateration right-wing media of him as an elitist. He appears not to get that either. He’s well-read, well travelled, and Harvard educated, but he needs to get down to the level of the common man and have a conversation with them.

One thing I have noticed lately is that the McCain campaign has been putting it out there at every opportunity they get, that Obama is avoiding having a “Town Hall” style debate forum… meaning that he’s either avoiding talking directly to the people or perhaps he does not think they are at his level. Of course this is untrue, but in layman’s terms, what voters in some these swing states are hearing is that Obama is not one of them.

I truly feel that more than anything now, he must figure out a way to get across to those who feel that he does not get them, and therefore is not one of them.

8

I don’t know the mind of Axelrod/Obama, but I feel like they have been putting on a slow, ramped sharpening of the terms of the debate for some time now. In terms of the actual campaign, the Palin selection did not much affect their communication. Palin makes me nervous, but I don’t see that she makes the campaign nervous.

The focus seems to be on the ground, on the ground, on the ground. They continually mention internal polling and math that is telling them to continue apace. They didn’t listen to all of the advice about “how to beat Clinton” and they do not seem to be listening much to the advice of “how to beat McCain”. I think they are withdrawing from some states they invested early in because of their own numbers and a flat judgement that they will be unable to hit their goals- so they are moving resources to hot states. They just weren’t sure what those states stood to be until they had some campaigning underway.

Personally, I’ll try to make a trip or two to Indiana, and I will trust in them what brought us. There is a long way to go.

9

One thing that will help is that McCain really is as out of touch as Obama has been saying.

For instance, he has said that “the fundamentals of our economy are strong” … TODAY!, in the midst of the economic shit hitting the fan this morning.

Last week he described himself as being out of touch with people’s day to day lives.

Obama has to hit this stuff even harder, and he does have a new ad out that calls McCain out for running a dishonorable campaign.

He may be no fool, but he has to amp up the attacks. Thankfully, he doesn’t have to stretch any truths to do so.

10

True - but every Dem nominee had to survive the primaries. Gore had a serious challenge from Bradley; Kerry was thought to be dogmeat just a couple months before Iowa. They both lost.

I missed the dire fundraising predictions, so that’s neither here nor there AFAIAC.

Kerry was viewed as having won all three debates with Bush. But it still didn’t put him over the top.

They can. I’m more concerned with what narrative is building up in the public’s mind about the candidates. By now, for instance, the whole damned country should know that McCain’s proposed tax cuts for the rich are even bigger than Bush’s - and for the rest of us, McCain wants to privatize Social Security. But public awareness of these points seems confined to high-information voters like us.

The RNC is also bringing in money, and GOP 527s are active too.

If Obama’s trailing slightly in a state, this will make the difference. If he’s down by 5, probably not.

And thanks to Palin, so will Republicans. Don’t ask me why, but they love their pretty little liar.

So, how’s that debate over the issues going these days?

I’m gonna say Clinton was a better candidate. I guess we’ll see.

Are you kidding? This election season has been going on since the winter of 2007. The seven remaining weeks are the blink of an eye.

My problem isn’t that I think Obama will lose, so much as that, this late in the game, he’s still in a position where he most certainly can fail to close the deal. McCain should have been defined long ago - on the issues. The lying stuff is good too, but you don’t want people to think, “he’s a lying SOB, but he’s my lying SOB”; you want them to think “He’s a lying SOB who will give the rich even bigger tax cuts than Bush did, and will gut Social Security to boot.”

11

I hope the OP is right, but I will say very plainly that I’m worried. Palin has the GOP far more charged up than I would ever have predicted. The polls are tightening even in states where Obama has led for most of the summer (and McCain has now, for the first time, edged ahead of Obama here in Ohio). Given all of the problems in the country right now, and all of the advantages which Obama enjoys, he should have a significant lead by now, and he doesn’t. I have a bad feeling that in a few months, I’m going to be reading stories about how Obama lost the election in August and September.

Not if I can help it, though. Time to write another check, and volunteer again with my son in our local campaign office.

12

Just keep in mind that the state polls are trailing indicators. A week ago, when the national polls looked their worst, people were saying, “but Obama’s leading in plenty of states.”

Now the projections at 538.com have caught up (down?) to last week’s national polls, and look really really crappy. Meanwhile, the national polls are tightening again (McCain’s +2 in Gallup and Rasmussen; Obama’s +[del]2[/del]3 in Research 2000 and +2 in Hotline/FD, the polls on RCP that show McCain ahead by >3 are the oldest ones) and over the next several days, that’ll work its way into the state maps.

The other thing is, the electoral map seems to favor Obama in a close election. If McCain wins the popular vote by 2-3 points, I’d expect Obama to win the Kerry states plus Iowa, with NM and CO being very, very close. (Obama could actually pull out the election while losing the popular vote by 2-3%. I wouldn’t want to rely on it, but I’d give it maybe a 15% chance of happening if that’s the popular vote margin.) In a dead even popular vote, NM and CO go blue, and OH and VA could go either way.

BTW, I still favor direct popular vote. But as long as the rules are stupid, I’m not going to complain when the stupidity works in my favor.

13

Obama’s response:

You can see that ad here.

14

A Des Moines Register poll taken right after the RNC has Obama leading by 12 points among likely voters, and he also has a double-digit lead among independents.

http://www.desmoinesregister.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080913/NEWS09/80913038&theme=IOWA_POLL

15

IMO McCain’s biggest political asset was the widespread belief in the political world that he was a statesman, someone who stood above partisan politics , someone who embodied seriousness and experience. During the primary when he had to pander to his party base this belief eroded to an extent but it was still alive, pundits would go on about how McCain’s campaign didn’t truly represent the man. In the last two weeks I think the idea of McCain the statesman has died and been buried forever. The Palin pick was a huge blow because it was widely accepted as being a purely political move; no one really believed that among McCain’s VP short list, Palin was the most qualified to be VP and potentially President. The kindergarten ad was probably the final nail in the coffin.

What has McCain gained by squandering this asset? Sure his base is fired up because of Palin but when all is said and done he is only slightly better off in the polls than he was before the convention cycle. Meanwhile there seems to be a Palin-related gaffe or outright falsehood coming out almost every day. I wouldn’t be surprised if Palin remains on the defensive about the bridge to nowhere and Troopergate for the rest of the campaign. There is no major national issue on which she can credibly claim to have governing expertise. Imagine what an asset Romney would have been on the ticket after the recent financial meltdown.

So while the race is fairly tight right now, I think Obama is in good shape overall and in better shape than before the convention cycle.

16

Obama’s going to win Iowa, but that isn’t going to help if he loses Ohio, which is still a horse race, and who knows what dirty tricks will play out on Nov. 4. I don’t understand a lot of the commentary here:

This is simply not true. McCain’s pick of Palin has NOT had a deterimental impact on his chances; he’s running neck and neck with Obama. It’s just simply the facts. electoral-vote.com has McCain winning 270-268, and I personally think it’s favourable to Obama, if anything, since it doesn’t account for the black-guy effect (which I know has a name and I can’t remember it.) I really do not believe Obama can pull off Colorado.

There is no reliable poll out there showing McCain is sinking or doing badly.

McCain’s campaign is spewing disgusting bullshit, but it apparently works, folks.

17

I’m impressed by the fact that 500,000 1st. time contributors answered his plea for money in August.

18

Here’s the full quote, from your link: McCain, in a speech in Jacksonville, Florida, this morning, said, “You know that there’s been tremendous turmoil in our financial markets and Wall St. And it is – people are frightened by these events. Our economy, I think still – the fundamentals of our economy are strong. But these are very, very difficult times.”

Now, I assume that by “fundamentals” he means thing like productivity, exports, new business start-ups and things like that. “Fundamentals”, meaning those aspects that will get us thru the current problems. So, are you saying that it was a politically stupid thing to say, or that he’s wrong? Because taking that snippet out of context makes it sound worse than it actually is.

19

Rick Jay,
What I said and meant was that the Palin pick was a huge blow to McCain’s image as a statesman and a different kind of politician. I am aware that she has helped him in the short run though the extent is sometimes exaggerated ; McCain is perhaps a couple of points better off than he was before the convention cycle.

20

“The fundamentals of our economy are strong” is a stalwart McCain phrasing and has been for a long time, you can see that he is in uncharacteristically pessimistic territory with the beginning of that sentence so he relies on his “fundamentals” quote to get him out of it with a brighter feel. Impolitic today, perhaps, to give that soundbite to his opponents, but also basically meaningless. You’re correct that it’s hard to say what fundamentals he is referring to.