Obama’s chances, less than three weeks before the election
First Charles M. Blow in the Times of October 17th:
I’ve studied the polls and the electoral map
for months, and I no longer believe that John McCain can win. Unless
Barack Obama slips up, Jeremiah Wright shows up or a serious national
security emergency flares up, Obama will become the 44th president of
the United States.*
The wayward wizards of Wall Street delivered
the election to Obama by pushing the economy to the verge of collapse,
forcing leery voters to choose between their pocketbooks and their
prejudices. McCain delivered it to Obama with his reckless pick of
Sarah Palin. That stunt made everything that followed feel like a
stunt, tarnishing McCain’s reputation and damaging his credibility so
that when he went negative it backfired. And, some radical rabble among McCain’s supporters delivered it to Obama by mistaking his political rallies for lynch mobs….
*If I’m wrong, I’ll take my crow with a six pack of Liquid-Plumr
Second, Frank Rich in his column today:
The election isn’t over, but there remain only three discernible, if
highly unlikely, paths to a McCain victory. A theoretically mammoth
wave of racism, incessantly anticipated by the press, could materialize
in voting booths on Nov. 4. Or newly registered young and black voters
could fail to show up. Or McCain could at long last make good on his
most persistent promise: follow Osama bin Laden to the gates of hell
and, once there, strangle him with his own bare hands on 'Hannity &
Colmes.”
And the third, Matt Bai in the Times Magazine today:
…. And yet it seemed fair to question whether anything about this
sudden movement [the movement among white voters in Virginia where McCain’s 22-point September
lead had shrunk to single digits and where the candidates were now tied.] actually validated Obama’s central argument about
American politics….
OBAMA WOULD gladly take that outcome, of
course. But it would not be the transformational victory he envisioned
when he set out to run, the one in which white men in exurbs and rural
counties wouldn’t just grudgingly vote for a Democrat out of
frustration with the alternative but actually come around to the idea
that a Democrat can share their values. “If I’m able to change this,”
he told me on his plane, meaning the cultural breach in our politics,
“then it’s probably going to be most powerful after I’m elected, when
you’re no longer in the context of day-to-day battle, and I can prove
it by what I do.”
I asked Obama if it was frustrating to have seen, throughout the
campaign, so many polls that showed him trailing badly among white men
with lower incomes or less education.
“It’s not frustrating,” Obama said, shaking his head. I found this
believable; Obama seems almost impervious to frustration. “There are a
couple of things at work here. No. 1, let’s face it — I’m not a
familiar type.” He laughed. “Which means it would be easier for me to
deliver this message if I was from one of these places, right? I’ve got
to deliver that message as a black guy from Hawaii named Barack Obama.
So, admittedly, it’s just unfamiliar.
“Which, by the way, is a different argument than race,” Obama
continued, pausing to make sure I understood. “I’m not making an
argument that the resistance is simply racial. It’s more just that I’m
different in all kinds of ways. I’m different even for black people. I
went through similar stuff when I ran against Bobby Rush on the
all-black South Side of Chicago.” In that race, a Democratic primary
for Congress in 2000, Rush, the black incumbent, handed Obama his first
and only political defeat. “It’s like: ‘Who is this guy? Where’d he
come from?’ So that’s part of it.
“The second part of it is that I’m trying to do this in an
environment where the media narrative is already set up in a certain
way. So it’s hard to not be dropped into a box.”
He reminded me that back in March, for instance, he accepted a
spontaneous invitation from a voter in Altoona, Pa., to bowl a few
frames, and it turned out Obama was basically a god-awful bowler. Some
commentators gleefully used this deficiency to portray him as out of
touch with the common man, in a John Kerry-windsurfing sort of way.
(Joe Scarborough, on MSNBC, used the word “prissy.”) To Obama, this
brought home the bleak reality that, as a Democratic nominee, he was
going to be typecast, fairly or not.
“I am convinced that if there were no Fox News, I might be two or
three points higher in the polls,” Obama told me. “If I were watching
Fox News, I wouldn’t vote for me, right? Because the way I’m portrayed
24/7 is as a freak! I am the latte-sipping, New York Times-reading,
Volvo-driving, no-gun-owning, effete, politically correct, arrogant
liberal. Who wants somebody like that?
“I guess the point I’m making,” he went on, “is that there is an
entire industry now, an entire apparatus, designed to perpetuate this
cultural schism, and it’s powerful. People want to know that you’re
fighting for them, that you get them. And I actually think I do. But
you know, if people are just seeing me in sound bites, they’re not
going to discover that. That’s why I say that some of that may have to
happen after the election, when they get to know you.”…
___________________
For Blow the recession and a few bad decisions by McCain will deliver the election to Obama. For Rich only a "mammoth wave of racism" would keep Obama from winning. For Bai Obama will probably win, if only by a few votes, because he seems now to have successfully eroded McCain's earlier massive lead among white male working class voters, those who still, after all, number in the millions in the small towns and rural areas of the country, and who loom especially large in the swing states, and especially in Virginia where, Bai implies, the entire election may be won or lost.
What do I think? I most of all fear for our country, that it's not up to choosing this fine man, Black from a Kenyan father and White from a Kansas mother, as the 44th. president of the fifty states. That it's not up to having his admirable young wife and the mother of his two children as the first lady of the land.
What happens in the voting booth? Do people most of all vote their fears and prejudices? If so they will vote for McCain, for he is well known and people are not afraid of what he will do. On the other hand do people vote their aspirations, their hopes, their desire to see their country change for the better? If so Obama will get their vote, for most of all Obama represents a powerful new direction for the country. His election will oblige us all to rethink the way we do things. His election will mean that nothing will be the same as before, and that most of all is what our country needs.
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