I expected Kerry to lose. My optimism for Obama is only slightly better, but slightly better is enough to put him over the top.
At Leaper’s invitation, I’ll add my $0.02 for a decisive Obama victory.
Here’s my thinking from last February, in a nutshell, once I realized that Obama was going to be unstoppable in the race for the nomination:
The typical “built-in” negatives for a Democrat, post [Bill] Clinton and post 9/11 (“less moral/upright/trustworthy”, “tax and spend”, “weak on national security”), are less in play this time due to the rather pronounced public dissatisfaction with Bush, with the Iraq occupation, and with the Republican party as a whole. The right wing is going out of favor, and consequently the right wing driven (and largely right wing created) memes are losing their appeal as well.
Combine this with Obama’s enormous natural positives, his candor and the “change” narrative he’s been extraordinarily adept at maintaining, and with the entire Republican field’s attempt to “out-Bush” each other in their primary performances (with the notable exception of Ron Paul), and it’s a pretty clear win for the Dems.
With the early presumption of McCain as the Republican nominee, none of the vulnerabilities go away for the Red team, and really, John McCain is even less substantial as a candidate than most of the other applicants - and they were uniformly bad, IMO. (Note that the Republicans have other nationally known figures with enough stature and appeal to have been formidable, who did not choose to run. Colin Powell or Tom Ridge might both have been better candidates than Romney, Huckabee, Guiliani or McCain.)
McCain’s two iconic virtues - “maverick” and “POW” - are both being wittled away even before the conventions. The first is being assaulted by Obama’s gang (and now even the Traditional Media are joining in), and the second is just being squandered by McCain’s own campaign team as an all-purpose answer to any and all criticisms or questions.
This is not going to be shooting fish in a barrel for Obama, but I believe the national context combined with his outstanding grassroots organization (he’s outspent the Republicans by a factor of 10 to 1 in setting up local offices!) have to result in a clear victory at the polls.
Barring an alien invasion or a vengeful Neocon God, this election goes Blue persuasively.
How well’s that been working the last few weeks?
You should be specific in your questions. This will help you get useful replies.
I’m pretty sure you’re going for something like “daily tracking polls show McCain’s negative attacks are working”. But the question itself shows a fundamental misapprehension. “[T]he last few weeks” represent a blip in an overall trend which is not important in and of itself. The Obama narrative has taken hold; it’s only assailable by a stronger narrative.
While I grant you that appeals to xenophobia and charges of elitism are tried and true political weapons, these attack ads have not shown any legs so far, and won’t unless Obama begins feeding into them, as Kerry did in '04 with his inability to speak straight or defend himself, and as Gore did in 2000 by validating the right wing excoriation of Clinton by choosing “Holy Joe” Lieberman as his running mate.
You cannot know what’s a blip and what’s a trend until much later. You have no basis for such an abrupt dismissal of any concerns over what the data indicates.
The rest of your statement is about what you think *should *happen, not what *will *happen, and it actually flies in the face of what is happening. A little less handwaving and a lot more actual work would help the cause far more.
I would say things are as they should be for this point in this election, wait and see what happens to Obamas numbers after the convention. If you think his numbers will fall, you might be in for a surprise. Biden is the perfect ‘bulldog’ to go after McCain. Let Obama keep doing what he’s doing, building his policies announcing his intentions in real terms and playing it straight. I’ll look at poll numbers seriously in late September.
Elvis, you can accuse me of “handwaving” all you want, but being as there’s really very little change in the overall polling, it’s still summer and we haven’t had either national convention, and the polls don’t even attempt to predict voter turnout, I don’t see any reason to think the sky’s falling quite yet.
Your mileage quite obviously varies from mine. We’ll see who called it right in November.
Going with what the data says instead of arguing against it is not simply “varying mileage”. :dubious:
You can certainly *hope *that things turn out all right, be my guest, but that should never be a source of actual confidence.
Ouch - but aren’t hope and confidence fundamentally linked?
Nope. Confidence is derived from fact, hope is in spite of fact. It’s very easy to confuse them in oneself, certainly, just as it is easy for a religious zealot to mistake his own faith for knowledge.
Hard work beats them both, as well as a lot of other things. And, remember the truism, often cited against Bush’s approach to Iraq as well as in many other cases: Hope is not a strategy.