RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events Barack Hussein Obama in '08?

What a difference being the Republican nominee makes [to whomod]

Until 2000, it hadn’t happened in more than 100 years, but plugged-in observers from both parties see a distinct possibility of Barack Obama winning the popular vote but losing the Electoral College — and with it the presidency — to John McCain.

Here’s the scenario: Obama racks up huge margins among the increasingly affluent, highly educated and liberal coastal states, while a significant increase in turnout among black voters allows him to compete — but not to win — in the South. Meanwhile, McCain wins solidly Republican states such as Texas and Georgia by significantly smaller margins than Bush’s in 2004 and ekes out narrow victories in places such as North Carolina, which Bush won by 12 points but Rasmussen presently shows as a tossup, and Indiana, which Bush won by 21 points but McCain presently leads by just 11.

One possible result: Even as the national mood moves left, the 2004 map largely holds. Obama’s 32 new electoral votes from Nevada, New Mexico, Colorado and Virginia are offset by 21 new electoral votes for McCain in Michigan and New Hampshire — and despite a 2- or 3-point popular vote victory for Obama, America wakes up on Jan. 20 to a President McCain.

According to Tad Devine, who served as the chief political consultant for Al Gore in 2000 and as a senior adviser to John F. Kerry in 2004, “it certainly is a possibility. Not a likelihood, but it is a real possibility.”

Some observers, such as Joseph Mercurio, a political consultant and pollster who worked on Sen. Joe Biden’s Democratic primary bid, see this as unlikely given the dramatic increase in Democratic Party enrollment and President Bush’s near record-low approval rating. Also skeptical is Nate Silver, a political cult-favorite blogger whose statistical model — which factors in population change since electoral votes were last allocated in the 2000 census — shows McCain as more likely than Obama to lose the Electoral College while winning the popular vote.

But others, pointing to the competitiveness of the past two elections, predict that this will be another such tight race. If they’re proven correct, this would be the fourth in the past five elections, making for the most closely contested run of presidential contests since those spanning the popular vote-Electoral College splits of 1876 and 1888.

Hank Sheinkopf, president of Sheinkopf Communications and an adviser to Bill Clinton in 1996, warns that such a split “is anything but impossible.” While he gives Obama a slight edge in the general election “because he doesn’t have George Bush riding with him,” he predicts that “Obama’s going to get big votes for a Democrat in the Southern states but not enough to win any new electoral votes. So it’s a distinct possibility that he could lose the entire South, split the Midwest” and end up not as president but rather as the second coming of Al Gore. When asked the odds of this playing out, he offers “50-50.”

Devine points out that Bush’s strategy in 2004 “was predicated on massive base turnout” that pushed up margins in safe states. He doesn’t “expect the McCain campaign to be directed the same way — using issues like gay marriage on the ballot to get the base to the polls — so McCain won’t have the same forces at play to drive out the popular vote.”

Recalling the impact of Ralph Nader’s third-party run in 2000, Devine also wonders if Bob Barr’s Libertarian run might play out differently, costing McCain popular — but not electoral — votes, while producing another popular-electoral split.

Lloyd M. Green, who served as research counsel to George Bush in 1988, also rates Obama a slight favorite and predicts that, if the Democrat does win, he’ll do so with “even larger margins in New York and California than in the last several elections [in 2004, Kerry won the two states by a combined margin of a little more than 2.5 million votes], and yet with all that margin run-up in safe states, this will end up a tight general election.”

In a sentiment also expressed by Sheinkopf and Green, Devine sees little chance of this happening if Obama wins the popular vote by more than 4 points. “But if he gets it by 2 or 3 points, it is plausible," he said. "Absolutely.”

Green, who sees “about a 20 percent chance” of Obama winning the popular vote while losing the Electoral College, doesn’t expect anything resembling a blowout: “Given that the only clear and clean majorities [since 1992] were in 1996 and 2004, ... this election will have the ferocity of all recent elections.” It’s a tough trend to buck, he argued, noting that “Americans traditionally change their religious affiliations more often than their party affiliations.”

Actually, whomod, you were the one who described the type of activity contemplated by Obama as "criminal."

Of course, that was when McCain was doing it.



I, personally, have no problem with either Obama or McCain eschewing public funding of their campaigns since, you know, I believe in free speech.

look whomod, this isnt Obama's first lie, it wont be his last, don't sweat it....

G-Man do you even pay attention to the stuff you yourself post?

Here, let me explain it to you.

If you go into the public finance system on account of needing funds to keep your candidacy alive, you can't later, when things are going better for you, decide to just drop out of it. It's not a revolving door.

that is what McCain did. Obama, never needing for funds, never went into the public financing system thus this issue doesn't apply to him in any way. Despite you trying (very badly) to confuse the issue.

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa." - George W. Bush

at least you agree they are no different.....

The first ad of the general election is on the air...

CAMPAIGN 2008
Barack’s Bounce

The latest NEWSWEEK Poll shows the Democrat with a 15-point lead over McCain.

Barack finally has his bounce. For weeks many political experts and pollsters have been wondering why the race between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain had stayed so tight, even after the Illinois senator wrested the nomination from Hillary Clinton. With numbers consistently showing rock-bottom approval ratings for President Bush and a large majority of Americans unhappy with the country's direction, the opposing-party candidate should, in the normal course, have attracted more disaffected voters. Now it looks as if Obama is doing just that. A new NEWSWEEK Poll shows that he has a substantial double-digit lead, 51 percent to 36 percent, over McCain among registered voters nationwide.

In the previous NEWSWEEK Poll, completed in late May when Clinton was still fighting him hard for the Democratic nomination, Obama managed no better than a 46 percent tie with McCain. But as pollster Larry Hugick points out, that may have had a lot to do with all the mutual mudslinging going on between the two Democrats. By contrast, in recent weeks Clinton has not only endorsed Obama but has made plans to campaign with him. "They were in a pitched battle, and that's going to impact things. Now that we've gotten away from that period, this is the kind of bounce they've been talking about," said Hugick.

The latest numbers on voter dissatisfaction suggest that Obama may enjoy more than one bounce. The new poll finds that only 14 percent of Americans say they are satisfied with the direction of the country. That matches the previous low point on this measure recorded in June 1992, when a brief recession contributed to Bill Clinton's victory over Bush's father, incumbent George H.W. Bush. Overall, voters see Obama as the preferred agent of "change" by a margin of 51 percent to 27 percent. Younger voters, in particular, are more likely to see Obama that way: those 18 to 39 favor the Illinois senator by 66 percent to 27 percent. The two candidates are statistically tied among older voters.

51% to 36% among registered voters!!

The last time this poll was taken they were tied 46% to 46%





Pollster.com's collected regional polls also finds the same trend.



buh bye Mcain!

There might be hope for the U.S afterall.

51% to 36% among registered voters!!

The last time this poll was taken they were tied 46% to 46%

isn't this the part where sammitch comes in and declares that the poll was taken out of context?

plus so many things can happen from now until November that quite honestly it doesn't mean diddly.

Sen. Barack Obama's announcement Thursday that he won't participate in the public financing system for this fall's general election was no big surprise. He has been telegraphing the move for months. But it is disappointing nevertheless, particularly for a candidate who claims to be running as a reformer and a different kind of politician.

In this case, Obama is choosing to be different by becoming the first presidential candidate to spurn public financing since Richard Nixon's excesses led to its creation. That's not the sort of change voters expected when he pledged last fall to "aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."

But that was then, and this is now. Obama has become a remarkably effective money raiser who has will take public money instead of private donations for the general election. Obama's "aggressive" pursuit of an agreement with McCain appears to have consisted of little more than a single meeting between aides for the two campaigns.

Despite the Democrat's earnest rhetoric about declaring independence from a "broken" system and the edge the cash-rich Republican National Committee gives McCain, it's hard to escape the conclusion that Obama's huge financial advantage over McCain is the real reason for his move.

The public system — financed with the voluntary $3 checkoff on tax returns — is far from perfect. But is it broken? Maybe for the primaries, where it provides so little money that almost every major candidate opted out. For the general election, however, it's robust enough to offer each candidate $84.1 million to spend in September and October if he forgoes private donations. Shouldn't that be enough?

Although Obama is being disingenuous about his reasons for opting out of public financing, he gets points for jawboning against the independent groups called "527s," after the section of the tax code they operate under.

Free of the contribution limits that apply to candidates and party committees, the 527s can raise vast sums and coarsen the campaign by smearing rivals in ways the candidates themselves cannot. McCain has said he can't "referee " them. He and Obama should at least try.

Obama likewise deserves credit for raising most of his campaign money from small donors in contributions of less than $200.

He's way ahead of McCain in that respect — but he's hardly the influence-free candidate he styles himself as. One-third of his money comes from the sort of big donors and bundlers whose influence public financing is designed to lessen.

Obama's pledge to reform the campaign-finance system after he gets elected reminds us of St. Augustine's famous prayer: "Lord, make me chaste — but not yet."

Real reformers don't do it just when it's convenient. The best way for Obama to support public financing is not to fix it later, but to participate in it now.

There are a number of firsts to be proud of in Barack Obama's presidential campaign.

But the candidate's recent decision to reject $84 million in public financing for the general election, and the spending limits that come with it, isn't one of them.

Obama's announcement finalized the backpedaling his campaign had done for months on the issue.

Last year, Obama, the reformer, made his position clear. In a questionnaire on campaign financing, he wrote: "If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."

That was at the end of a nearly 200-word statement about his belief in the public financing of campaigns "as a way to reduce the influence of moneyed special interests."

In short, if John McCain agreed to public financing in the general election, so would Obama.

All fine sentiments.

But that was before it became crystal clear that Obama and his savvy staff have a prodigious talent for raking in the bucks, from the hordes of small contributors e-mailing him money to high-rollers looking to back a winner to the White House. And before it became crystal clear what a disadvantage it would be for Obama to limit himself to spending the same amount of money as his challenger in the general election.

So now Obama, the insanely good fund-raiser, has flip-flopped, saying that the system is broken and he can't allow his Republican opponents to spend millions of dollars through independent groups to smear him.

He's right about that weakness in the system. The only problem with his argument is that Democrats can take advantage of the same loopholes and seem better positioned to do so this election season.

We judge our politicians by their willingness to stand tall on their long-held principles, even when it inconveniences them.

Obama has passed that test time and again.

He has set the bar high.

But in the end, his past performance serves only to spotlight how brilliantly he has failed this time.

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

But as recent weeks have made clear, Barack Obama is the most split-personality politician in the country today. On the one hand, there is Dr. Barack, the high-minded, Niebuhr-quoting speechifier who spent this past winter thrilling the Scarlett Johansson set and feeling the fierce urgency of now. But then on the other side, there’s Fast Eddie Obama, the promise-breaking, tough-minded Chicago pol who’d throw you under the truck for votes.

This guy is the whole Chicago package: an idealistic, lakefront liberal fronting a sharp-elbowed machine operator. He’s the only politician of our lifetime who is underestimated because he’s too intelligent. He speaks so calmly and polysyllabically that people fail to appreciate the Machiavellian ambition inside.

But he’s been giving us an education, for anybody who cares to pay attention. Just try to imagine Mister Rogers playing the agent Ari in “Entourage” and it all falls into place.

Back when he was in the Illinois State Senate, Dr. Barack could have taken positions on politically uncomfortable issues. But Fast Eddie Obama voted “present” nearly 130 times. From time to time, he threw his voting power under the truck.

Dr. Barack said he could no more disown the Rev. Jeremiah Wright than disown his own grandmother. Then the political costs of Rev. Wright escalated and Fast Eddie Obama threw Wright under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have been a workhorse senator. But primary candidates don’t do tough votes, so Fast Eddie Obama threw the workhorse duties under the truck.

Dr. Barack could have changed the way presidential campaigning works. John McCain offered to have a series of extended town-hall meetings around the country. But favored candidates don’t go in for unscripted free-range conversations. Fast Eddie Obama threw the new-politics mantra under the truck.

And then on Thursday, Fast Eddie Obama had his finest hour. Barack Obama has worked on political reform more than any other issue. He aspires to be to political reform what Bono is to fighting disease in Africa. He’s spent much of his career talking about how much he believes in public financing. In January 2007, he told Larry King that the public-financing system works. In February 2007, he challenged Republicans to limit their spending and vowed to do so along with them if he were the nominee. In February 2008, he said he would aggressively pursue spending limits. He answered a Midwest Democracy Network questionnaire by reminding everyone that he has been a longtime advocate of the public-financing system.

But Thursday, at the first breath of political inconvenience, Fast Eddie Obama threw public financing under the truck. In so doing, he probably dealt a death-blow to the cause of campaign-finance reform. And the only thing that changed between Thursday and when he lauded the system is that Obama’s got more money now.

And Fast Eddie Obama didn’t just sell out the primary cause of his life. He did it with style. He did it with a video so risibly insincere that somewhere down in the shadow world, Lee Atwater is gaping and applauding. Obama blamed the (so far marginal) Republican 527s. He claimed that private donations are really public financing. He made a cut-throat political calculation seem like Mother Teresa’s final steps to sainthood.

The media and the activists won’t care (they were only interested in campaign-finance reform only when the Republicans had more money). Meanwhile, Obama’s money is forever. He’s got an army of small donors and a phalanx of big money bundlers, including, according to The Washington Post, Kenneth Griffin of the Citadel Investment Group; Kirk Wager, a Florida trial lawyer; James Crown, a director of General Dynamics; and Neil Bluhm, a hotel, office and casino developer.

I have to admit, I’m ambivalent watching all this. On the one hand, Obama did sell out the primary cause of his professional life, all for a tiny political advantage. If he’ll sell that out, what won’t he sell out? On the other hand, global affairs ain’t beanbag. If we’re going to have a president who is going to go toe to toe with the likes of Vladimir Putin, maybe it is better that he should have a ruthlessly opportunist Fast Eddie Obama lurking inside.

All I know for sure is that this guy is no liberal goo-goo. Republicans keep calling him naïve. But naïve is the last word I’d use to describe Barack Obama. He’s the most effectively political creature we’ve seen in decades. Even Bill Clinton wasn’t smart enough to succeed in politics by pretending to renounce politics.

Yeah. I have a feeling that, if I started searching old threads from 2004, I'd find a lot of posts by whomod from the summer of that year, trumpeting one poll or another showing Kerry beating Bush.

If anything, I think it was clumsy act that displayed a certain overconfidence in his electability.

Don't get me wrong, there's a good chance he'll be our next president (God help us all), but it's not a done deal by any stretch.

Especially if his supporters turn out to be as skilled at managing a general election as they are at raiding message boards.