Posted by
Bill Crawford on Saturday, May 31, 2008 2:39:58 PM
One thing I'd like to state for the record up front: verbal gaffes are off my radar, for both candidates. They've been on the trail, speechifying and fund raising for over eighteen months now, and the heaviest five months are ahead of them. That's a trial that even the undead could not traverse unscathed. So if Obama seems to think that there are 57 states out there, I'll give him and his Ivy League education the benefit of the doubt, and assume it was the nicorettes and the caffeine talking. Cut them a break.
So I am going to do two things here: first, a quick break down of the electoral college (please be patient) and then an overview of Barrack's obstacles. Or, why this is McCain's election to lose.
This is based in reading the Rasmussen and Zogby polls (the most reliable ones out there), and deferring my occasional disagreements with Bob Novak's yeoman's work at similar analysis.
Here are the solid GOP states: Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, Georgia, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Montana, Nebraska, North Carolina, North Dakota, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Tennessee, Texas, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. These constitute 169 electoral votes.
These are the states that are leaning GOP: Florida, Indiana, Lousiana, Missouri, New Mexico, Ohio and Virginia. These total 101 votes.
The solid Dem states: California, Connecticut, Washington D.C., Hawaii, Maryland, Massachusetts, New Jersey, New York, Rhode Island, Vermont and Washington. These total 183 votes.
Leaning Democratic: Colorado, Delaware, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New Hampshire, Oregon, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. These total 85 votes.
That makes it 270 for John McCain and 268 for Barrack Obama. The nightmare of 2000 all over again, no? Not quite. There are a few states that are very much in play for both sides, and for reasons I'll go into later here, I think there will be a margin in popular and electoral votes closer to 2004.
Hillary's biggest error this weekend is diverting herself from anything but her most compelling argument: she would be the party's strongest candidate in November. She would put New Mexico and Virginia in play. She also would not be handing over the national security issue a priori to McCain.
Rudy would have been a stronger candidate than John. He would have had John's independence from an unpopular incumbent, he also would have put Pennsylvania in contention and even made a game of New Jersey. He also knows how to play political hardball.
As it is, the deciders will probably be Michigan and Ohio. It's a fair bet that the DNC will have it's largest cordon of lawyers based in Cleveland in early November. They are always fighting the last war, and John Kerry is still convinced that the Cayahoga Republicans and the demons in the Diebold voting machines kept him from the White House.
Barrack will certainly lose a few points because he is Black, as Hillary would because she is a woman, and McCain will because he is old.
Those points will not cost him the election. He will lose precious votes because he is still a relative unknown to many people (including many with his bumper stickers already on their cars), and there is too much of an undercurrent out there that he is some sort of stealth Muslim. His ancestry does nothing to help this. His wild and raucous friends don't help either.
Then there is the patriotism thing. If he didn't want to wear a flag lapel pin, he should have stuck to something casual- "It's on my other suit". But he had to pull out the Ivy League, urban, counterculture elitist argument of how he was looking to create an "alternative" patriotism. In the vast hinterland they call flyover country in the DNC, the rubes expect you to wear your patriotism on your sleeve.
It is this issue that might cost him states like Hampshire, Colorado and Iowa and bring John near the 300 electoral votes I think he will end up with. The Democrats will spend the summer trying to sell Bush and McCain as Siamese twins. Who is going to sell Obama as Jimmy Carter revisited? Somebody tell McCain that he is going to be demonized anyway, he may as well get some cuevos and start hammering Barrack. This election has no high ground. Karl Rove would know this.
So there it is. The Dems look weak because they are still beating each other up in June and their party (being run into the ground by Howard Dean) is not raising money like their nominee is. The Republicans look weak because they are supporting a war we are all tired of, the nominee is still not getting cash from the conservative base (that will change) and the incumbent party has the price of gasoline around it's neck like a yoke.
It's still culture vs. counterculture, just like 2004. If McCain gets his electioneering act together, he wins. If he tries to be above it all, he may hand it to someone who, by 20th century standards, should have come no closer to election nationally than Adlai Stevenson.