Blogs For Victory

RightWingSparkle offers her analysis of the state of the campaign:

The polls are back where they were before the conventions. McCain and Obama are in a statistical tie. Even when the polls show Obama up by 2 or 3 points, I’m not worried. Why? Because all indications should have him up by 15 points at least and he can’t break that 50% mark and stay there.

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Obama is running on the Democratic ticket with an unpopular Republican administration in power, gas prices out of control, and the economy in trouble. He should be riding the polls at 17 points at least.

I would add, that another relevant example would be AL Gore in 2000. If things were as great in the late 1990s as Democrats say they were, Al Gore should have won in a landslide…

Or at least, he would have won his home state.

With all the factors that should be contributing to a substantial lead for Obama, we still have a race that is virtually tied nationally, with blue battleground states like Michigan and Pennsylvania running neck and neck.

Are Democrats feeling a bit of buyer’s remorse? Privately, I’m sure many are. After nominating the most unqualified and inexperienced presidential candidate in history, it shouldn’t be too difficult, even for a partisan Democrat, to think maybe they should have gone with a leader with a strategy, not an orator with a teleprompter.

It also appears that enthusiasm for Obama is dwindling. In the battleground state of Wisconsin, Obama and McCain both recently held rallies in the same venue, and McCain drew a significantly larger crowd than Obama. The Obama campaign is downplaying the significance publicly.. but they have to be concerned.

Good times ahead.

Kevin Hassett takes an in depth look at the financial crisis and concludes not only that only are Democrats, including Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, largely to blame, but that John McCain “was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.”

The Jawa Report has a very lengthy post detailing the connections between a PR firm connected to the Obama campaign that appears to be behind a number of the false smears against Sarah Palin.

A couple months ago, this was an impossibility…now, its just something with little chance, but that still works to McCain’s favor:

Post-convention swing state polls are tipping toward Sen. John McCain, the TV pundits are waxing about “The Palin Factor,” and Sen. Barack Obama’s California supporters are freaking out about a race Democrats were uncommonly confident about only a month ago.

Conversely, Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s addition to the GOP ticket jolted Northern California Republicans out of what one described as their “Underground Railroad” existence in one of the nation’s most liberal regions. Ever since her speech to the Republican National Convention on Sept. 3, party officials say volunteers have been contacting California GOP offices in numbers unseen since Ronald Reagan was on the ballot for the White House…

…Republicans aren’t giving up on California. California Republican Party chief operating officer Bill Christiansen said some private polls put the two candidates within five points of each other, and the McCain campaign is staffing 50 offices throughout the state. Four years ago, the Bush-Cheney campaign barely had a presence in California, and spent little money. “But we are fully funded this time,” Christiansen said, declining to give a figure.

The state GOP is making 125,000 voter contacts every weekend, “which blows the doors off of what we were doing four years ago,” said Christiansen. “Sarah Palin has put a shot of energy into this race.”

Last week, the McCain campaign e-mailed supporters to say it was “looking for volunteers who are willing to spend the final 10 days of the campaign helping in a nearby state.” But at the San Mateo County branch of the McCain campaign, 300 people turned out last week for its volunteer kickoff event; the turnout was goosed by Palin, organizers said. Now the office is welcoming first-timer campaigners like Phil Lehman, a 63-year-old Foster City resident.

His reason for volunteering: “Sarah.”

“There’s a realness to her, a believability,” Lehman said. “I think she’s going to eat Joe Biden’s lunch at the (vice presidential) debate.”

The initial boost to the GOP out of California is the number of volunteers who will be available to help the GOP win Colorado and Nevada – making phone calls, donating to the RNC and the State parties. This, in and of itself, is a great things – but there is more here.

Winning California would, of course, ensure a GOP victory – but, lets face some facts here, the chances of actually winning California are very slim. But that’s just it – they are slim, not non-existent; and in this there is the chance that we can force Obama to fight for California. Every dollar and minute spent in California, New Jersey, Michigan, Pennsylvania and New York is a dollar and minute not spent in Colorado, New Mexico, Iowa, Ohio and Florida…in other words, we can move the fight to Obama’s side of the field and thus have a clearer shot at maintaining our 2004 electoral votes, and thus ensuring our win even if we don’t pick off a single blue State.

One thing to keep in mind is what happens when things get competitive. Over the past few Presidential elections, California’s participation has been akin to Texas’ – a bit more than 50%, but nothing to write home about. Why? Because over the last few election cycles the outcome in Texas and California was known months in advance. Turning to Florida, we can see that in 2004 the participation 74%, and it was 70% in 2000. Its a battle, and that gets people out to vote…as it stands right now, we can expect Obama to win California, and to have somewhere around 55% of California’s voters show up to vote. If the election in California becomes competitive, it will turn on who will show up to make the voter total go up to 60, 65 or 70%. My bet would be that Democratic voter participation is higher than GOP voter participation in California, so any increase in voter participation would tend to favor the GOP.

From what I can tell, 2008 is the year to throw out the rule books – forget about which States are solid this or solid that…there are too many variables, and the election could end up won by whichever candidate is most willing to think outside the electoral box.

The Union Leader in New Hampshire has a great editorial pointing out how Barack Obama’s attacks on John McCain in recent weeks have had no resemblance to the truth.

In the past few weeks, Obama has thrown so many false accusations against John McCain that just keeping track of them has become difficult. And these aren’t innocent errors. They are deliberate distortions of the sort Obama has always said he reviles.

On Thursday, Obama said of McCain, “He has consistently opposed the sorts of common-sense regulations that might have lessened the current crisis.” That’s entirely untrue.

As The Washington Post pointed out in an editorial on Friday, McCain in fact has supported many new regulations of financial institutions, including some that Obama opposed. “In 2006, he pushed for stronger regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac — while Mr. Obama was notably silent,” The Post wrote.

And why, perhaps was Obama silent on that issue? He was only taking hundreds of thousands in donations from Fannie Mae and Freddia Mac… but you probably didnt’ hear about that from Obama..

Obama attacked McCain for having a top financial advisor who supported a deregulation bill a few years ago. Yet two top Obama financial advisors, with whom he met on Friday to help him form his response to the current troubles on Wall Street, supported the same bill, which was signed by President Clinton.

Also last week, Obama released a Spanish-language ad that portrayed McCain as anti-immigrant and anti-Hispanic and tried to link him to immigration policies that were not his own as well as some choice Rush Limbaugh quotes that appeared to insult Mexicans.

Anyone who has followed the immigration debate knows that McCain is the most pro-immigration Republican on the national stage and that he is not in the least anti-Hispanic. To pull quotes from Rush Limbaugh, who has completely different immigration views than McCain and who opposed him on that issue for years (and still does) is completely disingenuous. The ad is so bad that even The New York Times called it “misleading.”

And you know if the New York Times is willing to concede Obama is a big fat liar, than you know it’s one hell of a whopper he was trying to pull.

There’s also this one here, relating to the ad McCain put out a couple weeks ago that Obama decried as false, when it in fact was true.

Obama’s campaign also accused McCain of lying when McCain’s campaign ran an ad saying that Obama supported sex education for kindergarteners. But the bill in question, which Obama supported in the Illinois state Senate, did indeed change state law to allow sex education for kindergarteners.

Katherine, over at our McCain blog, is encouraging people to contact FactCheck.org to get them to admit their original assessment of the McCain ad was indeed wrong, and calling for CNN to retract their statements on the ad as well.

Could Obama’s negativity and lies backfire on him? Indeed they could.

Obama has said that he won’t attack John McCain’s motives, only his policies. But he has repeatedly attacked McCain’s motives, suggesting that he has been bought off by oil companies and lobbyists.

Obama’s greatest strength as a candidate, aside from his oratorical skill, has long been his apparent sincerity and decency. Voters attracted to him think of him as that rarest of things: an honest politician. He has claimed himself that he would never engage in the sort of deceptive politicking that he says has tainted Washington for so long.

Yet here he is violating his own professed standards. This is not the Barack Obama so many voters in New Hampshire and elsewhere thought they knew. But it is the real Barack Obama. For despite his rhetoric, he is in fact campaigning so dishonestly that even The Washington Post and The New York Times have called him on it. Which means that he is in practice no different from those regular politicians against whom his entire campaign has been built.

Barack Obama has been encouraged by his party in recent weeks to step up his attacks…. unfortunately for Obama, his heeding this call forces him to contradict his self-made brand of a new kind of politics. His so-called politics of hope and change now appear to be the politics of fear, lies, and the same old politics as usual.

I’ve been telling you, dear readers, that Obama is a zero to whom people apply whatever they wish to believe about him:

How’s Barack Obama’s narrative going?

Journalists used to tell stories, now they plumb narratives. Narrative is a pretentious borrowing from the abstraction-clotted world of academic criticism, where texts are interrogated, authors are dead and high-toned fatuousness is king. I’ll see your postmodern and raise you a meta.

Mr. Obama’s campaign, however, has renewed narrative’s trendy fizz. It is the very Perrier water (or is it San Pellegrino now?) of the better campaign reportage. Take no hike up Pundit Mountain without it. From the moment, the Obama surge took forceful shape, everyone – reporters, the scholars of blogland, the partisan howler monkeys of cable-news cage matches – has chattered on about Mr. Obama’s narrative.

Trouble is, most of the story of the campaign isn’t so much coming from the candidate himself as it is created by all those who, most in worshipful terms, have talked, written and reported on or about him. The Obama campaign is one great text generator, the grand fable of his fans.

In one sense, this is not surprising. He has a quicksilver quality. Even after two autobiographies, Mr. Obama remains something of a floating, uncrowded presence. His story (and he is so impressively self-aware as to have made the most acute comment on it) is temptingly open-ended, very much a page to be written on. He himself has written, most memorably: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

There is very little to Barack Obama – he’s glided through life without making much of an impact. One of the recent Obama ads I’ve seen (and we here in Nevada are bombarded with McCain and Obama ads – the perils of being in a Battleground State!) has Obama ernestly telling viewers that he wants to change and that change has to be more than just a slogan…as if Obama’s campaign has ever been anything other than a slogan. He offers nothing specific in the ad – though he does say he hopes people will read his plan…and, naturally, when you do go and read his plan you find it thin on details, but that isn’t the point…the sort of people who will be impressed by Obama are people not at all curious about what is really going on, but are very much interested in projecting on to Obama’s blank slate whatever they feel is best.

As I’ve pointed out before, Obama is the “Un-Named Democrat” – the stealth candidate who can be all things to all men without being anything concrete to anyone. You want someone who will heal racial divisions? Obama. Re-unite the people of the United States? Obama. End the campaign in Iraq? Obama. Reverse global warming? Obama. Make foreigners love us? Obama. If there’s something about the past 8 years which has gotten on your nerves, Obama is the guy to fix it…not that he’s told you how he’ll fix it, but by speaking in grand themes and having nothing solid you can point to and either agree or disagree with it. That Obama has given zero indication that he can so much as change a light bulb without assistance is neither here nor there – for the Obamaniacs, he’ll get the lightbulb screwed in just by being there.

Another thing I’ve said is that if Obama can keep his fairy tale out front, then he can win – only if he makes people believe he is Prince Charming come to rescue us does he have a shot at this…unfortunately for Obama, a lot of people have got a good, long look at him and found him lacking. Pity none of his boosters can see this. We’ll have to see how it all comes out, but if Obama loses the hope will be that the Democrats will conduct a purge and get rid of the kooks who have taken Democrats for a ride.

This does explain a lot on why so many in the MSM and on the left don’t understand what is happening in America – from Concerned Democrats for McCain:

Still on the road, but one thing is clear in Manhattan – – they IDOLIZE Obama here. Not support. Idolize. His picture is on every corner. His t-shirt is for sale at every stand. His button is on all the better purses. It’s like Beijing in Mao-ist China.

That’s why the NY based media can’t believe he can’t break 50% (or 80+% among Democrats).

They really need to cross a bridge or tunnel once every so often, and talk to the rest of the country.

Come November 5th if Obama loses I feel confident we’ll come across at least some Obamaniacs who can’t understand how he lost as they don’t know anyone who didn’t vote for him. I’ll bet this slavish deovition to The One is duplicated in Boston, Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other enclaves of elitist liberalism. A bunch of people talking only to their like but convinced they also know what “the people” want…

Victor Davis Hanson answers it perfectly:

I have been asked by many why I have such confidence in a rookie Alaskan governor, given the rigors of the campaign to follow. (Many Republican pundits apparently do not.) I think we are starting to see the answers to that question. The proverbial “they” hacked into her private email accounts. They swore that her daughter was the real mother of her Down Syndrome baby. They sent legions of reporters and lawyers to Alaska to dig up dirt. They wrote columns suggesting that she was stupid, uneducated, dishonest, a liar, and worse still. All this was the work of moralists, who, in their more extreme manifestations, tried to flood a Chicago radio station to disrupt guests, who doctored photos of McCain to subvert his portrait, who disgraced the Atlantic brand by trafficking in pregnancy rumors, and who now publish the private email of Palin.

And? She is still smiling and apparently unmoved. Had they done this to Biden, he would have gone berserk. Wait—they didn’t do this to Biden, and he seems near berserk in his daily gaffes.

I happened to catch a little bit of Governor Palin speaking in Florida today and there she was – just as fresh, positive and combative as she was during her magnificent acceptance speech at the GOP convention. The people on the left who have been hammering her don’t seem to realise that they’ve got another Reagan on their hands – a calm, confident person who doesn’t need politics for self-validation and, furthermore, who doesn’t care what anyone in the MSM/Leftwing echo chamber thinks about her. For Sarah Palin (as for Reagan in the past), the constituency is God, family, friends and the people…news media, other politicians and elitists of various stripes don’t make the cut.

One day the left will get it – she’s one of us. She’s of that part of America – the overwhelming majority – which believes in God, believes in fellow Americans, loves this nation, would rather a child become a soldier than some bizarre, pierced and tattoo’d weirdo participating in anti-globalization demonstrations, is generous to a fault and is keenly aware of personal failings while conscious of the promise of ultimate redemption. Right now, the left doesn’t get it – because they aren’t of us; and the reason Obama is failing to close the deal in an anti-GOP political climate is because he’s so outside the experience of average Americans. Leftists convince themselves this is due to racism but the truth of the matter is that people who love Condi Rice are dismayed with Barack Obama (and, lefties, Condi Rice – for all her superlative brilliance – is still one of us…she’s risen high but hasn’t cut herself off from the average American).

Meanwhile, the left’s failure to “get it” works to our advantage – though Hanson notes that eventually Obama will figure out that attacking Palin (ie, making the battle “Palin vs Obama”) is a sure loser, we can count on Obama, his Democrats and the larger left to continue to impale themselves upon the conservative spear called Sarah Palin. By the time they turn, bloodied an incomprehending, back to the real battle, it may be too late for them to retrieve the situation.

Jennifer Rubin over at Pajamas Media has an excellent run-down on how things are going – pointing out that in spite of conventional wisdom to the contrary, McCain has managed to make this a race where either side can win. Certainly as 2008 dawned, the conventional wisdom wasn’t just that the Democrats were going to win, but that they were going to win big. This Conventional Wisdom missed a few salient points:

1. America didn’t really turn left in 2006. Sure, the Democrats won Congress but only by combining conservative Democrats in some GOP districts with a general dismay amongst the GOP for the way the Congressional GOP had been behaving. As Pelosi and Reid congratulated themselves, the plain fact of the matter is that America remained a center/right nation just waiting for a compelling reason to back center/right candidates and programs.

2. Americans don’t like to lose wars.

3. Democrats – no matter how hard they tried to parse it – were (and are) in favor of America’s defeat in war.

4. No overtly liberal Democrat has won the White House since 1964 (and shortly after that infamous liberal victory, I was born. Coincidence? I report, you decide) and, as a matter of fact, no Democrat of any type had scored a majority of the Presidential vote since 1976. As a rule, Americans don’t warm up to liberal Democrats in the White House.

5. The top contenders for the Democratic nomination in January of 2008 were all out-and-out liberals.

6. Nancy Pelosi is Speaker of the House, Harry Reid is Senate Majority Leader. I suppose in the legislative history of the world there have been worse leaders…but I’m a fair to middlin’ historian and I’m not aware of any.

7. The MSM was going to cheer lead for whomever the Democrats nominated, and once Obama emerged as the front runner the MSM went absolutely nuts in overtly supporting his candidacy.

8. It could very well be that most Americans would rather their son become a piano player in a whore house rather than an MSMer. To say that Americans have a low opinion of the MSM is to put it in amazingly overly kind terms.

9. The kook left had become predominant in setting the Democratic agenda and, furthermore, convinced that a majority of Americans wanted to implement a kook left agenda.

10. The Republican party wasn’t just going to roll over and play dead.

That last point is the most important – and anyone who has been paying close attention to what people do as opposed to what people say could see in an instant in January of 2008 that things weren’t exactly as Conventional Wisdom was asserting. If the year was really for certain the Year of the Democrat, then why did the GOP field include four first rate GOP candidates while the Democrats only mustered one serious national contender (I know that Obama won it, but you have to think back to pre-Iowa when it was all Hillary all the time…everyone else, including Obama, seemed like a weak also-ran mostly looking for a VP slot – except to me, who figured Obama for the Democratic nomination as early as September of 2007)? If Democrats were surging to certain victory how come they couldn’t pass anything which didn’t pass muster with President Bush? If Democrats had it in the bag then why did Congress’ approval ratings sink even lower than President Bush’s? The GOPers who were paying attention (and this would include those who were willing to plunk down the time and money in seeking the GOP nomination) realized that while the year was strong for the Democrats, there was still plenty of opportunity for a well-managed GOP campaign to take the big prize.

To be sure, there were some blessings for the GOP along the way – most notably in the lengthy Democratic nomination process which damaged the ultimate nominee as well as dividing the Democratic party and drying up many sources of Democratic funding. If we GOPers do win in November, we’ll owe a bit of it to Limbaugh’s “Operation Chaos”. But, by far, it was the way the GOP coalesced fairly swiftly around the one man who could really take it to the Democrats on their own terms – and, of course, the way McCain and Team have run the campaign to this point. There was much fear and carping from conservative punditry over McCain’s campaign until the Palin pick, but all I’ve seen from the start is a well-managed campaign designed to capitalize on McCain’s strengths and highlight the Democrats’ weaknesses. Even if McCain loses, he has provided an object lesson in how to get a candidate off the ground and into the running.

Who will win? I’m hoping for McCain – and while I have prayed for both Obama and McCain, I do add that I pray McCain’s efforts will be crowned with victory. But I don’t know who will win – I thought I’d know within a week of the end of the conventions, but there are just too many variables out there for me to latch on to the scenario for the last 50 days. But I rest content each night knowing that, win or lose, we will still win in the end.