2008 Hispanic Vote
67% Obama 31% McCain

The GOP has alienated the fastest growing set of Americans, possibly for a generation.

Si Se Puede.

McCain’s got us right where he wants us.

Let’s see to it that this mess remains a theory.

ALSO: New polls show a 2-4 point lead for McCain… in Arizona! He’ll likely win it, but by comparison Sen. Obama has about a 25% lead in Illinois.

And yet, McCain has the nerve to say that the polls are all over the place.

Look, I don’t expect him to say “I and my campaign suck eggs.” But come on.

Then again, almost 8 years ago George W. Bush was campaigning in California – nobody knows why to this day. Bush went on to lose California by 12% to Gore.

Its the kind of situation that makes you wonder if someone paid them to take the fall.

John McCain is losing this campaign. I don’t want to hear anybody pretending otherwise. The election is 12 days away and John McCain is behind Barack Obama both nationally and in the swing states.

McCain now chooses finally to find something wrong with George W. Bush. The McCain campaign would really like it if we collectively forgot the last 5 years and his tireless advocacy on behalf of President Bush. Too late.

McCain is launching a “Joe The Plumber tour”. Seriously. If you’ve followed the campaign or read the Draper piece in the NY Times, you know that this is part of their pattern of constantly relaunching the campaign which has failed every time they’ve done it in the general election. They caught a break in the primaries but the song and dance that sells with the Republican base doesn’t do much for the normal American crowd that determines our election.

Nobody on Obama’s side believes that this election is in the bag. As Sen. Obama himself constantly says – remember New Hampshire. But let us not fool ourselves either. Sen. Obama is in the lead. Sen. Obama is beating John McCain. Sen. Obama has a much better chance of being our next president than John McCain.

Just end it.

Here in Maryland, you can go out to the Eastern Shore and see a ton of McCain signs. In 2004, there were a ton of Bush signs. Kerry won here, Obama will win here.

Not indicative of anything.

WUSA Channel 9’s (the CBS affiliate) open to the 11PM news: “If you’re watching this in Northern Virginia, you may not be in the ‘real’ Virginia according to the McCain campaign”

The RealClear Politics website’s average of polls, which gives Mr Obama a lead of 6.8 per cent over Mr McCain, offers a better guide to the situation. It compares to John Kerry’s lead just a few weeks before he lost the 2004 election to Mr Bush.

Ok, here is the RealClearPolitics average of polls from 2004:

Notice something? After late August of 2004, Sen. Kerry never had a lead on President Bush. That’s exactly the opposite of what the Financial Times said.

Again, I don’t think the election is in the bag. I think Sen. Obama is going to have to fight, fight, fight the last few weeks against a Republican attack machine who has never faced a situation this negative before. But let us not rewrite history – recent history – in order to create some narrative for John McCain that doesn’t exist.

Here is the current state of the race, using the RCP average.

At this point, Sen. McCain’s trajectory has more in common with Sen. Kerry’s.

Already the signs point to the John Birch wing of the GOP taking over. Immigration hasn’t been an issue, so the xenophobes have been angry, while the isolationists think they aren’t being heard. Ditto for the Christian right, who are enraptured with Palin but still don’t have the zeal they had for their born again hero George W. Bush. I would contend that the relative unimportance of the abortion issue as well as side issues like separation of church and state to this election doesn’t please this bloc either. Post-election, if Obama wins, I expect the Birchers to go up against the Wall Street types. And I see Pat Robertson positioning himself as the leader of the Bircher wing.

Considering that faction is composed of the same people screeching that Obama is a terrorist, that would bode excellently for the Democrats (Who I guarantee will have their own argument over whether Obama is progressive enough. Long time readers can probably guess where I line up in that fight.)

Here’s hoping the right goes into the wilderness and loses its map.

We’re in the middle of so much right now, all manner of crises – foreign and domestic. We need so much for a steady hand to lead the nation and the world at this point. We need someone to finally pull this country together after the divisions of the last 16 years. There is a line between a vigorous, competitive democracy and warring tribes, and we’ve crossed it. Not healthy. And if something isn’t good for America, it hurts the entire planet.

So I look at all these numbers. 90% of voters say the country is on the wrong track. With steady consistency a majority of the voters support Sen. Obama in the polls. States that weren’t supposed to be in reach now are, while the “safe” states remain quite safe.

I don’t feel the sort of dread I felt going into the 2002 election, nor do I have the queasy “jump ball” feeling from 2004, or the elation from 2006 where I figured a gain was likely and the excitement was only a matter of degree. I feel good about this election. Really good. 85% good.

And yet… I keep trying to convince myself that America won’t disappoint me. Maybe I’m just beat up from the last eight years, as I remarked to a friend after the ‘06 election, until then you had the sense that Democrats just couldn’t be elected in America anymore.

And yet… 2008 is so different. No WMD in Iraq. Post-Katrina. Mid-Financial crisis. And I get the sense that out there, in the great mush that is the collective American consciousness that something really awesome is happening.

But I can’t let myself get carried away with it. Just gotta wait for election day.

We are go, flight.

Campaigns that aren’t winning usually leak information to the press. Campaigns divide, with one faction seeking to have an upper hand on the other by leaking something damaging to the media. We most recently saw this with Sen. Clinton’s campaign and now it’s John McCain.

Some McCain campaign officials are becoming concerned about the hostility that attacks against Sen. Obama are whipping up among Republican supporters. During an internal conference call Thursday, campaign officials discussed how the tenor of the crowds has turned on the media and on Sen. Obama.

Someone yelled “Off with his head” at a rally Wednesday for Sen. McCain and Gov. Palin in Pennsylvania. Later that day in Ohio, a man stood outside a rally holding a sign that said “Obama, Osama.” At a rally in Jacksonville, Fla., on Tuesday, someone in the crowd wore a T-shirt depicting Sen. Obama wearing a devil mask.

The Obama campaign, with widening leads in several national polls, dismissed the attacks. “Sen. McCain’s campaign has admitted that if he talks about the economy, he’ll lose, so we fully expect him to continue his angry, personal attacks,” Obama spokesman Tommy Vietor said. “Barack Obama will continue to talk about his plans to strengthen our economy and create jobs because that’s what American families care about.”

There is another faction (call them the Rove faction) that desperately wants McCain to launch ads with a Jeremiah Wright theme. This back and forth confirms what those of us from the outside see: John McCain is losing and he wants to fling poo against the wall in the hopes that something sticks. In the midst of that, Palin is whipping up the crowds into a racist xenophobic frenzy that doesn’t play well with anybody but the inner core of the conservative movement.

Have you noticed that there are never any of these kinds of leaks from the Obama campaign? Much like the Bush campaign in 2004 only strategically leaked to the press, so too does Sen. Obama’s group.

Winning campaigns work that way.

For the last few days, at a distance the McCain campaign has whipped up a frenzy of nativist sentiment against Barack Obama. They’ve accused him of being strange, not a supporter of America, and of course as a terrorist sympathizer. They’ve done it mostly through Sarah Palin’s forked tongue, but McCain also took a punch at Sen. Obama, powering through an attack as the assembled mob screamed “terrorist” at Obama’s name.

Then a funny thing happened on Tuesday night. John McCain had to go into a room with Barack Obama. He had to stand on stage with Sen. Obama and in front of the entire nation. Surely John Mccain, a veteran of combat, would take the baton from his running mate, get up in front of the naive Barack Obama and show him who the real American in the race is.

Then he fizzled.
He shot blanks.
The horse never got out of the gate.

John McCain suffered from a case of Electoral Dysfunction that no little pill can cure. Because Barack Obama was able to tell America why he disagreed with Sen. McCain right to Sen. McCain’s face in the same tone Barack Obama uses in Chicago, Miami, Indianapolis, Madison, Scranton, and everywhere else across the country.

Because Barack Obama is a man.

A few weeks ago, when the unvetted Sarah Palin was announced as John McCain’s running mate, I said she was a “base pick”. Some of my readers on the right disagreed with me, arguing that Palin would appeal to independents, and even the McCain campaign seemed to believe that the intellectually uncurious Sarah Palin would appeal to disaffected Hillary Clinton supporters.

As events have played out, it turns out I was right. Sarah Palin exists on the Republican ticket to get conservatives riled up. She acts something like a wind-up version of the Fox News Channel, railing at the “liberal media”, whipping up right-wing radio style frenzies about the scary, strange black world of Barack Obama. Palin is the walking and talking symbol of the 20-something percent of people who still think Bush is a good president.

The upside for Democrats is that Palin is precisely the sort of person who turns off independents and motivates Democrats. If some had been lured into a false sense of security that John McCain would run an honest, moderate campaign as he once promised, Palin tells us that that John McCain died a long time ago. McCain/Palin is a promise that the slash and burn politics of the George Bush era, the era in which the president of the United States has taken an unprecedented role as the divider of the nation, would get worse. For the right Bush/Cheney is now the standard.

Thats a heck of a motivator for the rest of us in normal America.