aberman's blog

I'm starting to wonder if this overseas trip will go down as one of the biggest presidential campaign mistakes of the last few decades.

It's not that Obama made any gaffes, or that he was too popular among foreigners, or that he painted over the American Flag.  Think about the undecided voter. Just where does "getting along well with Europe" stand on their list of worries?

I can see the campaign might think that this tour would make Obama look 'more presidential.' But Obama is the Democratic Nominee for President.  If they're worried about that at this stage in the game, then they have serious problems.  Furthermore, how are cheering crowds in Europe going to change that?

I know that imagery has a lot of power.  But images are transient. The memory of this trip is going to fade.  In the meantime, McCain is going around getting votes by giving speeches to actual voters.

I just saw this on an Obama advertisement:

Not sure what it means, but I figure I'd pass it on.

We all know the famous story about how radio listeners thought Nixon won the Kennedy-Nixon debates, while television viewers thought the better looking, better shaved Kennedy won the debate.  But don't you get the impression that the Obama campaign has over-learned the importance of imagery?

In this television and internet saturated country, people have caught on to the idea that appearance is often constructed.  And while many may still be affected by it, at least a certain part of the population may start to feel that their intelligence is being insulted by a candidate who spends too much time on his appearence.  After all, what did this do to John Edwards' campaign?  Now take the Obama campaign:   More than his personal looks are tightly controlled: literally every visual of Obama seems to be part of a tightly-written movie script. 

Unfortunately for Senator Obama, the Presidency is not a movie.  I think Americans understand the difference between the two.  It may take a couple of our own videos/statements to help Americans better understand how the Obama campaign is playing them for mindless tv-drones, but I think the potential for a substantial blowback against the Obama campaign is there.

Looking at the NBC News/Wall Street Journal Poll in June/ 2008, the top three respondents' concerns 'if you had to pick one' were the economy at 27 percent, the war at 24 percent, and gas prices at 18 percent.   After gas prices, the next highest, health care, was 8 percent.

McCain has the winning position on gas prices-- drill and conserve combined.  McCain has the winning position on Iraq since Obama's primary campaign position is not popular, and his movement to the center is not believable.  That's 2 out of 3.

Obama probably has more credibility on the economy right now because McCain is a Republican.  But the public has not evaluated or responded to their stated economic policies.  When they do, all McCain has to do is tie Obama.  If McCain does this and has no 'Macaca' moments, then his winning positions on Iraq and gas prices will bring him to the White House.

 This has me wondering.

Clearly, Barack Obama is fighting very hard to prevent the publication of much of what he did in Chicago.  Now, some of it may just be good opposition to opposition research.  On the other hand,  if he truly is worried, then those who do have access to Obama's record have something over him.  And who has access to Obama's record?  Why, those who worked with him in Chicago, of course!  And who are those people?  The very people he's trying to disassociate himself from: the hard left nutballs whom most of America wants to be nowhere near the White House.

Barack Obama is the main player in a fantasy being played out in front of us by the Left.  Here's the fantasy:  A brilliant, wise, caring and progressive leader runs for President.  He is both black and white: a living rebuke to the anti-miscegenation laws of the past.  The evil right-wing Conservatives rise up in racist reaction against this wonderful leader.  Good Americans are aghast at the bigotry displayed and react by voting for this leader in droves, leaving the Conservative movement in tatters.

This fantasy is overpowering.  But conservatives are mostly reacting in an appropriate manner-- we are challenging his background, his beliefs, and his effectiveness. We are discussing issues.  And we have a candidate who is running pretty much 100 percent on issues. This is not what the Left wants-- even an Obama win on the issues does not help the Left validate themselves. So the Left is doubling down by trying to make it 'all Obama, all the time.' For them, the Right is a collective Colonal Nathan Jessop and at some point we'll break and scream "You can't handle the truth!" followed by a blistering stream of racial invective that will cause us to collapse and be led off the political stage for good.

According to Ruffini's blog post, Democratic consultants say it's all about Obama. It's not all about Obama.  It's all about the Left *using* Obama to validate their particular Manichean world view.  But the American people are simply going to get annoyed that CBS, NBC, ABC, MSNBC, and the New York Times are not informing them about John McCain. So they will look elsewhere to learn about the candidates.  And we will inform them about John McCain while readership and viewership of the Leftist media continue to drop.

I'll get straight to the point:  I am a Recovering Liberal who voted straight Democrat up until 2004 when--much to the chagrin of my family and many friends--I pulled the lever for George Bush.   I do credit Jesse Helms for his tremendous positive role in the foreign policy arena.  However, rightly or wrongly, I and a great many others would not have been willing to cross over from liberalism to conservatism if Jesse Helms had played as large a role in the 21st century as he had in the 20th.

Up until the exodus of Jesse Helms, Trent Lott, and Strom Thurmond, the Left could always claim that to be a conservative or a Republican was to support racism.  I'm not saying that the claim was true. I'm saying that the claim was effective politics.  The Left cannot do that anymore and that is a very very good thing for conservatism and the Republican party.

I had a very disturbing conversation with a pro-choice relative of mine the other day. The conversation arose because I had heard that Barack Obama voted against protecting babies that had been born as the result of a botched abortion.  Whatever anyone's views about abortion, I had figured that once the baby was born, that was it.  Well, I was wrong.  Here is a paraphrasing of my conversation:

Me:  Look, once the baby is born, you can't just kill it, that's murder.

Her: I'm just not willing to go that far.

Me: What do you mean?  The abortion is over.  The baby is out.

Her: I see what you're trying to do.  I'm just.. it's more complicated than that.  You have all these 21 week olds and doctors have to make decisions.

Me: Let's not get distracted.  Suppose it's a 28 week old.  Shouldn't you treat the baby the same way you'd treat any 28 week old preemie?

Her:  It's more complicated than that.

Me: OK, let's nail this down.  Forget 28 weeks.  Say it's a 38 week old.

Her: There's almost no 38 week abortions in the country.

Me: I know.  Just let's play this out.  Ok, here's a question:  A woman is home and she's 38 weeks pregnant. She gives birth at home.  Someone comes into the house and takes the baby and throws it out the window.  That's murder, right?

Her: Right.

Me: Ok.  The woman is home and she's 38 weeks pregnant.  She has an appointment with an abortionist. But before she can go, she gives birth.  She then throws the baby out the window. How is that not murder?

Her: It's more complicated than that.  I just can't call it murder.

She then raised the example of a 7th grader who was raped by her uncle, gave birth in her middle school bathroom and discarded the baby.  I just couldn't get her back on track.

A strongly pro-choice person cannot consider a late-term abortion murder.  Yet just as a pro-life person doesn't see a significant difference between a baby with an hour left inside the womb and a baby out of the womb for an hour, neither can the pro-choice person.  Thus, they are confronted with the problem that their justification for permitting abortions of babies inside the womb eventually justifies permitting the killing of babies outside the womb.

Judging the worth of a baby based on the mother's desire for it takes us back literally thousands of years to before Judeo-Christian Civilisation.   Do we really want to bring back a feminist version of pater-familias? How did we get to a place where people don't understand this?

Basically, the fact is that McCain is tied with Obama under conditions which are extremely adverse for Republicans.  If things just revert to the mean, McCain will have a massive win.

Look at some details: McCain has the more popular plan on oil.  He wins on oil if the price goes up, and he wins if the price goes down as anger at Republicans will decrease.

Neither side has really addressed the housing market.  But the latest revelations about Obama's failed housing in Chicago won't help him.

Iraq:  As the surge continues to work, McCain is helped by that as well.  And of course, there is the possibility that Iraq will be pumping even more oil in a few months.  If oil prices are decreasing around then, well, that's quite the narrative, isn't it?

Basically, McCain has nowhere to go but up.  And he's not really even down.  That's why I'm predicting 320+ electoral votes in November for McCain.

Here's a thought experiment:  Suppose Sam Nunn or Lee Hamilton or any Serious Democrat (i.e., not a Harry Reid) was Senate Majority Leader.  Furthermore, suppose the Democrats had a serious, respected Speaker of the House (i.e., not Nancy Pelosi).  Who would the Democratic nominee for President be?  My guess is that it would be someone with a lot more gravitas than Barack Obama.

Some of the intensity of the support for Obama has to be based on the fact that the Democratic Party is, at its upper levels, extremely weak.  Simply put, there is no Democratic Senator who is both nationally known and universally respected.  That's also true, of course, for the House.

There's a lot of worry about how the Republican Party has been irreparably damaged due to their big government spending, Bush's inconsistent policies, Iraq, etc...  But at the end of the day, the Republicans have some great people coming up.  Some of them, such as Sarah Palin, Eric Cantor, and Tim Pawlenty, are prospective VP candidates.  And McCain himself has gravitas that nobody on the other side of the aisle can approach.

Promoting and publicizing the best of the Republicans will do wonders to improve the image of the Republican Party and will help show the Democrats, especially their new leader Obama, as shallow grandstanders.