McCain Ascendant!

This half-agrees with my official editorial position:

GOP strategists mull McCain ‘blowout’

It sounds crazy at first. Amid dire reports about the toxic political environment for Republican candidates and the challenges facing John McCain, many top GOP strategists believe he can defeat Barack Obama — and by a margin exceeding President Bush’s Electoral College victory in 2004.

...But the contours of the electoral map, combined with McCain’s unique strengths and the nature of Obama’s possible vulnerabilities, have led to a cautious and muted optimism that McCain could actually surpass Bush’s 35-electoral-vote victory in 2004. Though they expect he would finish far closer to Obama in the popular vote, the thinking is that he could win by as many 50 electoral votes.

I have long maintained that McCain-Obama ends in a landslide; I just can't say who will win.  People like "Hope and Change, but if "Hope and Change" founders on the very real question of whether the Emperor has any clothes at all, McCain wins.

MORE:  May I express my resentment of this Newsweek poll with its Racial Resentment Index?

Obama's race may well explain his difficulty in winning over white voters. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, participants were asked to answer questions on a variety of race-related topics including racial preferences, interracial marriage, attitudes toward social welfare and general attitudes toward African-Americans. Respondents were grouped according to their answers on a "Racial Resentment Index." Among white Democrats with a low Racial Resentment Index rating, Obama beat McCain in a hypothetical match-up 78 percent to 17 percent. That is virtually identical to Clinton's margin in the category, 79 percent to 13 percent. But among white Democrats with high scores on the Racial Resentment Index, the picture was very different: Obama led McCain by only 18 points (51 to 33) while Clinton maintained a much larger 59-point lead (78 to 18).
Who exactly are these high Racial Resentment Index voters? A majority, 61 percent, have less than a four-year college education, many are older (44 percent were over the age of 60 compared to just 18 percent under the age of 40) and nearly half (46 percent) live in the South.

I am withholding judgment until I see comparable polls on "White Guilt" and ageism.  I also want to see pollsters probe whether a white woman with Obama's record of achievement could possibly be taken seriously as a Presidential candidate; then they should ask President John Edwards whether a smooth talking white guy with no resume can win the Democratic nomination and the White House.

I ranted about this when Geraldine Ferraro stated the obvious.

PILING ON: Karl at Team Protein is excellent on the deficiencies of the Newsweek poll, as expected.

Comments

[kim]

"Joltin' Joe' could make it a landslide, either way. McCain should grab him, except that I doubt Lieberman would go with Obama. No hurry, I guess; let the suspense build. Better, keep it as an option to see how the summer plays out.
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[kaz]

I'm left wondering how they defined the 'South'. And how they split things geographically in general.

To say almost half is in the South implies over half is in the North, doesn't it?

[Cecil Turner]

Obama's race may well explain his difficulty in winning over white voters.

Right. Think it might also help explain his success with black voters? Ya gotta love it: "vote for Obama or you're an undereducated southern racist!" Let me know how that works for 'em.

[JB]

"many are older (44 percent were over the age of 60 compared to just 18 percent under the age of 40)"

Will white geezers be the new security/soccer moms?

[hb]

Florida electrol college, Honda will redistrict Denver and sell our votes off to the UN abolishing electoral college?

Florida Crist VP because of the mad dems? The vote? Rommey is from Mass like the Kings and Queens who pass around Congressional seats and stop term limits by electing family when their done. It's not only the money that keeps them in power, but the lack of term limits allowing people to serve. Kennedy was there longer than Castro. I'm supposed to worry about some rich family that bought its seats in Congress, the Presidency and died there? He and his family took too much opportunity from people to serve.

Obama will be worth what the Clintons are worth by the election. 100 million. Bums.

[Dave]

Newsweek is already worried that their messiah might lose, so they're setting up the story line to blame it on "racism" if he does. Interesting how they define it though - if you're opposed to racial discrimination ("affirmative action" in Newspeak), then you're guilty of "racial resentment".

[Rick Ballard]

Both Time and Newsweek are just getting ahead of the curve. Why wait for the November 10th issue to find out why the sorriest candidate since McGovern got his butt kicked? I really hope Newsweek sticks with the race angle. I'm sure they consider it a "teachable moment" but I doubt that the results are going to please them at all. Turning the Presidency into an affirmative action "Must Hire" position will take a few more decades.

[Danube of Thought]

Michael Barone has much to say on the race issue, and as usual it's well worth reading. Link under my name.

[JB]

"Turning the Presidency into an affirmative action "Must Hire" position will take a few more decades."

And by then AI will rule the planet making the presidency something akin to "King For A Day" anyway.

[kim]

'took too much opportunity'. Sometimes, hb, you make a lot of sense.
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[RichatUF]

Cecil: "vote for Obama or you're an undereducated southern racist!"

Well BHO does have an emissary, the "Special Rapporteur on Contemporary forms of Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Intolerance" Doudou Diène [SROCFFORRDXARI for short], to hold up that "mirror". I'm sure plenty of racism will be found when they are taking a break from the hookers, blow, and 4 star dinners.

[MikeS]

When I first saw Barack Obama I thought he was cool. I knew he was black. I thought he was a great speaker, and that name could have come straight out of a Star Wars script.

As I learned more about him, I realized that I didn't like him. I disliked some of his ideas and his friends, but I still thought his name was cool.

Now that I know a bit more about the man and his ideas, I find him scary. His foreign policy ideas seem completely disconnected from reality. His ignorance of history and geography are staggering.

Does that make me a racist?

[Gmax]

Gosh why do they need excuses, its a Democrat year. They tell us about every 5 minutes. Oh besides the carp candidate I mean.

[Gmax]

MikeS

You still have a chance to redeem yourself with your betters at Newsweek. Repent I say, or you might have to attend a reeducation camp once the one we have all been waiting for ascends.

[serfer62]

Yes MikeS you're a racist if you don't vote for NObama.

So does that mean the 96% of blacks are racist because they vote for the Organizer?

The sad thing is that MacNasty is the only GOP potential who can lose to this clown...

[MikeS]

Repent I say

I'm willing to repent if I must, but does that mean I have to believe all the insane carp that come out of the mouths of Michelle Obama and "Ride Dirty" Wright?

[kim]

See, these people like Soros, buying exposure, are 'taking too much opportunity' from the polity to assert itself. It is venal for leadership to manifest itself in this manner. He, et al, are mistaken.

Look at Al Gore and his $300,000,000 ad campaign funded by internet and 'anonymous' donors. Generally speaking, 'anonymous' donors don't like to throw money around to no benefit. That'll be some comfort while we're sitting around carping about the cold.
=====================================

[Jane]

That's a good article by Barone, as always. But I'm coming to the conclusion that Obama doesn't believe in anything. He's good a mirroring those around him, to make them feel good, but beyond that, nothing he says seems to be the least bit thought-out. In the debates he would echo Hillary, on the stump he says nothing - well except "freedom from fear" being a right, which I am still stunned by. At any rate, when he is forced to take a stand, it always backfires on him - like the meeting with Ahmadinejad, Chavez and Castro thing.

I really think he is just an empty suit.

[bio mom]

Can we call for Obama to get a chest x-ray or cat scan of his lungs and a set of pulmonary function tests since he was a very heavy smoker since his youth?

[JB]

"Direct presidential talks" is a strategic error of catastrophic proportions. McCain supports a League of Democracies and will be able to use it to demolish Obama's meme that the US is too arrogant and needs to talk to scum to show otherwise. The idea that the democracies of the world must carry out a united foreign policy based on shared values is going to be appealing to more voters than "let's indiscriminately give credibility to tyrants."

[Chris]

Shouldn't be close. Then Newsweek and the rest of the MSM can spend twenty years telling us how we were duped into not electing the chosen one. Good times!

[clarice]

Too bad for the writers there but the days when Newsweek and Time could pick our presidents ended with Carter and Clinton I think.

[Jane]

I hope you are right Clarice.

[clarice]

Last poll I saw something like 80% of Americans distrusted the media coverage on Iraq..why wouldn't that spill over to the Presidential contest?

The media was in the tank for Gore and Kerry. Newsweek's chief ,Evan Thomas, said that bias for Kerry was worth 15 % points to Kerry and he still lost. Maybe they have to put more than their thumbs on the scale, and apparently they have. Their asses are on the line this time and I hope I'm right about the public's perception of that.

[JB]

One would think they're trying to guilt whites into voting for Obama. But guilty whites are already in his corner. The emotion they would have to elicit is shame, and that's only possible in a caucus system, not secret ballot.

Yeah, looks like they're setting up the victimhood narrative for the next generation of blue castle dwellers.

[Jgf]

Someone already called the UN.

[Rick Ballard]

I believe the media's ability to peddle low quality ProgJunk™ to be an illusion. They couldn't sell Stevenson, JFK doesn't qualify as a "real" prog (vide tight relationship with J. Edgar, Joe McCarthy), they couldn't sell McGovern, Carter was sold as a centrist (as was Clinton), they couldn't sell Mondale, they couldn't sell Dukakis, they couldn't sell Gore and they couldn't sell Kerry.

The only way that Evan Thomas' statement could be true is if 15% = "warm bucket of spit". 'Cause that's the "true value" of Time and Newsweek (and the NYT - ask the shareholders).

I don't deny their ability to create a negative impression but that's not exactly how a "sale" is made.

[Foo Bar]

then they should ask President John Edwards whether a smooth talking white guy with no resume can win the Democratic nomination and the White House

It would be much more appropriate to ask whether a white guy like Edwards could have won the nomination if he had opposed the Iraq war from the start, as Obama did. As it was, Iowa went for Obama over Edwards, 38% to 30%. If Edwards had been a vocal opponent of the invasion before it happened, that might well have made the difference.

In the Democratic primary field, nobody other than Obama and 2 guys with no chance (Kucinich and Gravel) opposed the war from the start. That makes it highly debatable to conclude that he would not have won if he were white. To suggest as much without even addressing the distinctive edge that Obama got from his opposition to the invasion is quite an oversight.

[PeterUK]

"When I first saw Barack Obama I thought he was cool. I knew he was black. I thought he was a great speaker, and that name could have come straight out of a Star Wars script."

I could never bring myself to vote for Obama,half white is simply too much white.

[clarice]

Rick ,what a rich description of the electoral power of the Fourth Estate. Of course tarring honest people's reputations and interfering with the proper conduct of wars is something they are far better at. Perhaps if they stuck to what they're good at, and left it at that.

[MikeS]

I could never bring myself to vote for Obama,half white is simply too much white.

What if Obama was to pick up some much needed 'gravitas' from his VP pick? I'm thinking of someone like Cindy Sheehan.

[RichatUF]

5 more months of stories like this...

[PeterUK]

"I'm thinking of someone like Cindy Sheehan."

Sorry,she is just too too.

[Danube of Thought]

"It would be much more appropriate to ask whether a white guy like Edwards could have won the nomination if he had opposed the Iraq war from the start, as Obama did."

Actually, Obama merely opposed it before he didn't know whether he opposed it or not. Apart from the fact that opposing the war as an Illinois state legislator is about as courageous and insightful as doing so as a member of the Boulder City Council, there's this historical inconvenience:

"In a recent interview, [Obama] declined to criticize Senators Kerry and Edwards for voting to authorize the war, although he said he would not have done the same based on the information he had at the time. 'But, I'm not privy to Senate intelligence reports,' Mr. Obama said. 'WHAT WOULD I HAVE DONE? I DON'T KNOW.' What I know is that from my vantage point the case was not made'" (New York Times, 26 July, 2004).

John Edwards had zero chance--zero--of getting the nomination regardless of his stance on the AUMF. And we will never know whether Obama would have opposed or supported it had he been a Senator at the time.

Of course, his story may change...

[Danube of Thought]

It seems to me that a truly un-debatable insight into Obama's judgment on the war in Iraq can be divined from his more recent behavior, when he was actually in the US Senate.

No one can deny that, had the nation taken the course urged by Obama twelve or eighteen months ago, the US would have been seen by the entire planet, and particularly including the Muslim world, to have suffered a humiliating defeat in Iraq. Having rejected his unsound and immature advice, the nation is now moving closer to victory--and to a monumental defeat for Al Qaeda--with each passing day.

We'll hear more of this between now and November, rest assured.

[ben]

Newsweek poll has Obamamessiah 46 McCain 46...McCain must be ahead by at least 10 pts...

[cathyf]

It took me all the way to page 18 of the 20-page pdf:

SAMPLE SIZE/MARGIN OF ERROR FOR REGISTERED VOTERS SUBGROUPS:

1,205 Registered voters (plus or minus 3.5)

345 Republicans (plus or minus 6)

419 Democrats (plus or minus 6)

414 Independents (plus or minus 6)

496 White Dem/Lean Dem (plus or minus 5)

139 High RR Index1 (plus or minus 10)

357 Not High RR Index (plus or minus 6)

So, they only asked the RR-index-eliciting questions of white democrats or democrat leaners (496 of their 1205 person sample.) And the high RR index dem population only turned out to be 139 members of the sample (11.5% of their sample.) Does that mean that when they asked RR-index questions of republicans, they found that there were very few republicans who had high levels of racial resentment? Or did they find that republicans with high levels of racial resentment were not any less likely to vote for Obama than the republicans who were not racially resentful? Maybe both?

With the racially resentful on the lunatic fringe, why should Obama care that he doesn't draw quite as successfully from them? I mean, what I found most striking is that being racist didn't really decrease a democrat's probablity of voting for Obama by very much.

[Foo Bar]

Apart from the fact that opposing the war as an Illinois state legislator is about as courageous and insightful as doing so as a member of the Boulder City Council

He had already formed a campaign committee for his '04 Senate run, so his position on the foremost foreign policy question at the time mattered a great deal.

John Edwards had zero chance--zero--of getting the nomination regardless of his stance on the AUMF

Well, now that you've asserted this without any supporting argumentation, I'm convinced!

[JB]

Ras daily tracker has Obama at 33% VERY UNFAVORABLE (to McCain's 23%).

I'm no poll expert, but that would seem to be bad news for Barry. This is before the September campaign.

[narciso]

Even Fareed Zakaria, admits the politically incorrect reality of the rightness of the Iraq/Afghanistan/Gitmo/TSP program
:href* Keep it under your hat, Fareed.

[JB]

"When I first saw Barack Obama I thought he was cool. I knew he was black. I thought he was a great speaker, and that name could have come straight out of a Star Wars script."

He's something from that carpy Matrix sequel with the Cornell West cameo.

Barack is being marketed to the Matrix demographic - 25 and under.

[Schornick]

Foo Bar:

Too bad Obama did not get right of Wright before he opposed the war.

It says a lot about Democrats that they are more concerned about a candidate who supported removing a mass murdering dictator from power than a candidate who sat there and listened to that hate mongering bigot rant and rave for a couple of decades.

[clarice]

cathy, No one else seems to have bothered to probe the survey as far as you have. It would be a great stand along blog if you care to submit it to AT,

[clarice]

**stand alonE****

[bad]

Irony and hilarity in one fell swoop:

The Wisdom in Talking, Senator John Kerry- Washington Post

[Danube of Thought]

Obama's position on the "foremost foreign policy issue of his time" as of 2004 was one of uncertainty as to what he would have done had he had the authority to do anything.

What sort of argumentation would you prefer on the matter of Edwards, other than that he lost badly? To imagine what would have happened to him had he opposed the AUMF is about as fruitful as imagining what would have happened to him if he were black. He lost, and lost horribly, and he's done.

I fail to see why, apart from his blackness, Barack Obama is any more plausible a candidate than Dennis Kucinich. Dennis certainly has more experience in the congress and in executive authority. And while he does see the occasional flying saucer, Obama doesn't see racism in Reverend Wright.

The known racist Geraldine Ferraro had it precisely right: the only reason Obama is where he is is that he is black. And as the known racist Shelby Steele puts it, Obama offers absolution from past racial sins for those who vote for him. There are millions of teenage yokels who buy that crap, but it won't avail him in the fall against an actual person.

[PeterUK]

The stance of Obama,wide or otherwise,can be judged by the fact that Iran was paying Iraqis the kill British soldiers no doubt Americans too.

[clarice]

bad, is that really you, sweetheart. If so, I hope you are well.

[Ann]

Karl Rove is interviewed by Lisa DePaulo in the May issue of GQ.

An interesting tidbit:

Karl Rove tells how he got to know Obama because they have a mutual friend, Ken Mehlman, who was his law-school classmate at Harvard. "And so as a result, whenever in the White House, I've gotten to see him, and we sort of would hang around and chitchat about things. I'm actually in his book. He wrote that "people like Newt Gingrich, Tom Delay, Ralph Reed, and Karl Rove say we are a Christian nation." And I did not say that. I confronted him about it. At the White House."

Q: And what did he say?

"Well, first he denied that I was in the book! And then he denied that it said that I said that it was a Christian nation. And then when I pulled out the thing (he had a copy of the offensive page with him) and showed it to him, he sort of blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah-blah. And I thought, That's who he is. I mean, look, he may claim that he's for a different kind of politics, but that was a cheap shot. And I'm not certain if any of the four said it either. But it was like, you know, Let's just strap it in there and see if it goes someplace."

[Foo Bar]

To imagine what would have happened to him had he opposed the AUMF is about as fruitful as imagining what would have happened to him if he were black

Imagining what would have happened to him if he were black is essentially what TM is doing in his post. He's suggesting that Edwards and Obama are similar in that they're both smooth talkers with "no resume" and suggesting that the difference in outcomes can be explained by Obama being black and Edwards being white. So musing about how Edwards would have done had his AUMF vote been different is as legitimate as what TM is doing in his post.

I don't concede your point that Obama doesn't deserve credit for early war opposition just because he acknowledged the possibility that some of the intelligence might have changed his mind. Even if that point were true, though, it's not relevant to the question of whether Obama's success is because he is black or because of (at a minimum) the perception of his longstanding Iraq opposition. Even if you think Obama has hoodwinked primary voters into believing that he deserves credit for war opposition that he doesn't actually deserve, it is nonetheless the case that he is perceived by many to deserve that credit. The existence of that perception amongst voters provides a compelling explanation for his success in the primary that does not depend on his race. A vast majority of Democrats believe the invasion was a mistake.

Kucinich's presidential platform had several positions that were far more extreme than Obama's, including creating a "Department of Peace", ending the war on drugs, immediate withdrawal from the WTO, and legalizing same sex marriage.