Nothing like seeing a mean, miserable, race-baiting old bastard sink.
The Evans-Novak Political Report reports a Grim Picture for McCain saying "The picture is as grim for Sen. John McCain and Republicans as it is for the U.S. financial sector. If the election were today, Sen. Barack Obama would win in a blowout, with huge coattails at the Senate and House level."
Various electoral vote predictions agree.
Pollster.com, Election08data, 538.com, and the Intrade Prediction Market Electoral Map all show an electoral blowout.
Alan I. Abramowitz at the writes at The CrystalBall08:
In the past sixty days, despite a series of dramatic events including the Democratic and Republican national conventions, John McCain's surprise selection of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his running-mate, a financial crisis on Wall Street, and the first presidential and vice-presidential debates, there has been very little change in the relative standing of the candidates. ... With one month remaining in the 2008 presidential campaign, both national and state polls indicate that the election is still Barack Obama's to lose. Obama is running ahead of the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee, John Kerry, in the large majority of states and in every major demographic group with the exception of voters over the age of 65. He continues to do far better than Kerry among two groups: voters under the age of 30 and Hispanics. He is currently leading in 13 of 15 battleground states.McCain's desperate and predictable tactics (that truth be told Hillary employed to a far lesser extent last winter) ought to result in someone asking McCain: Do you not have any shame?
Defining and branding Barack Obama involve what advertising and marketing professionals call impressions—the projection of one image (in this case Barack Obama) onto one human brain (a voter), and a truism of cognitive psychology, that fear and anxiety reactions are intimately related to cognitive beliefs and thus can be manipulated.
Designing and managing Obama’s brand by generating impressions for the benefit of John McCain, it is necessary to merge negative (ostensibly plausible) aspects of Obama onto the consciousness of key voting demographics susceptible to certain appeals based on fear and xenophobia.
The more frequent and emotionally potent the impression, the greater is the political impact.
That’s why we see the McCain project of generating political impressions of Muslim, Black, stranger, unsteady, creepy, alien, inexperience, Ayers, not one of us and so on. Who is this man? Is he going to kill us or get us killed? Those ludicrous questions are meant to be invoked by appeals to fear. So we are seeing in response a biographical TV spot by Obama being run again. Obama looks like such a nice black man; maybe he's a good one of them.
The Obama response is working well. And less people than McCain would like don't care so very much about black as green.
One threat to the McCain project is the negative reaction of the African-American community and its allies well-versed in recognizing racist appeals, subtle or not so subtle. In Milwaukee, for instance, 1o,000s of people came out in February and voted for Obama and judging from an examination of a sample of their voting histories, these were depoliticized and non-frequently voting people, just the type that the GOP wants to frustrate and suppress at the polls.
Concomitant with branding Obama is the project of projecting McCain as a unique and convincing brand of steady, strong, experienced, familiar, and knowledgeable with vast foreign policy and national security experience.
That is failing miserably as this week's debate reveals.
Some demographics can be counted on to actively combat McCain’s racist, divisive project:
- Today's socially tolerant under-29 vote
- Social justice progressives
- Casually political, middle-class Americans fed-up with seven years of Bush and division and concerned about fairness
- Women and minorities
- Growing numbers of professionals
McCain is running out of Americans to divide.
[Some parts of the above piece are borrowed from a March 12 column run as Obama had locked up the nomination some three weeks previously in a snowy Wisconsin February.]
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