Friday, May 30, 2008

The Final Straw for Obama?

For the last month, as the Democrats' nominee-in-waiting for the Presidential race has been underperforming his party's generic advantage by at least 10 points, in a statistical tie with Republican John McCain in nearly every poll despite the allegedly radioactive Republican brand. A combination of the bitterly divisive primary race with Hillary Clinton and a number of personal scandals have done immeasurable damage to Barack Obama, a candidate whose skin color is unfortunately working against him, particularly in working-class majority white areas east of the Mississippi River. Nonetheless, we've been told by the commentariat that Obama can problem weather the storm of those past controversies as long as nothing new emerges.

Well, this week, something new emerged....and watching the video on the evening news tonight, I'm wondering if this will be the final straw for him.

Once again, at the center of the controversy is Obama's church, where a guest pastor (actually a white Catholic priest with some serious confusion about his own racial identity!) flamboyantly called Hillary a white supremacist....to a crowd of cheering parishioners....the same people Obama claims are an integral part of his faith community. To put it bluntly, he's screwed. The church that has become such a vital part of this campaign has just outed itself as warm to a message of racial intolerance and separatism. Until this week, it was Reverend Wright alone who represented the scary face of Obama's church. Now, voters recognize those sentiments in the church are not just limited to Wright.

Expect this story to snowball through several news cycles the same way the Jeremiah Wright story did, with demands for more and more apologies from Obama, and Obama ending up looking weak by ultimately capitulating to the endless demands to apologize for a guest pastor who spoke at his church when he wasn't there.

There was little doubt that race would end up becoming the central theme of this race, admirable as Obama has been personally in not playing the race card. It was painfully obvious that many of Obama's overzealous supporters would cry racism early and often, but I am a little surprised how so many people so close to Obama are personally responsible for so many of his biggest problems. This Catholic priest, for example. How could he have not known that those comments would cause a blistering political firestorm that would HURT Obama, and hurt him badly? It's gotta be a nightmare for Obama himself, particularly at this juncture of the campaign where so many Hillary supporters already have serious reservations about him. For this priest, however loosely connected to Obama, to make racist AND sexist comments about Hillary Clinton will produce one more obstacle for Obama to overcome in his outreach efforts to Hillary supporters. This scandal has probably emerged too late in the campaign to deny Obama the nomination, but I suspect it will be looked back at as the point of no return abyss next November after Obama loses.

Now, for a brief word on John McCain.....

The media talking point since February when McCain secured the nomination has been that "McCain is the ONLY Republican capable of winning this November". Hogwash! McCain has had the luxury of marinating in fawning media coverage ever since his 2000 Presidential campaign, and thus has high approval ratings among independent voters. But the support is a mile wide and an inch thick. McCain's policy prescriptions are almost all assembly line Reagan-era leftovers whose appeal have hit record lows among voters in the last couple of years. The more McCain talks about what he plans to do as President, the less enamored voters will be of him.

Luckily for McCain, voters don't elect Presidents based on policy positions, they elect Presidents based on personality and gut-level cultural connections. McCain used to wear the "nice guy" mask well when a camera was in his face, but in the throes of a high-profile Presidential campaign, we're seeing more of the Mr. Hyde side of McCain that everybody in Washington has already seen behind closed doors. With increased regularity, McCain is coming off a smug, insufferable smartass who cannot contain his dripping condenscension towards anyone he either disagrees with or views as unworthy of sharing a stage with him. We saw it in virtually ever exchange McCain had with Willard "Mitt" Romney in the primaries, and it looks like that was a warmup act for McCain's monthslong campaign of smugness towards Barack Obama that lies ahead. And given that Obama has shown great skill at knowing how to push McCain's button without looking out-of-bounds himself, McCain is almost certain to behave in such a way that diminishes his "guy you'd like to have a beer with" appeal that's worked so well for him so far and helped elect George W. Bush twice.

With all of that said, I don't believe McCain is "the only Republican who could have won the Presidency this year". I'm not even entirely convinced he was the most electable Republican in the primary race, as Mitt Romney and Mike Huckabee would still be able to take advantage of the millions who don't trust Obama while hanging onto all of the conservative vote, a certain percentage of which will never support McCain due to his alleged past acts of treason against the conservative movement.

McCain will almost certainly win, but it may end up being closer than most expect, not because McCain is such a good candidate able to win over independents no other Republican would be able to this year, as the media likes to tell us, but in spite of the fact that he's a flawed candidate whose age and increasingly prickly demeanor turned him into a guy swing voters only pulled the lever for because he was the "lesser of two evils". John Kerry, if he were untainted by his 2004 campaign and subsequent faux paus, would be able to beat John McCain in 2008. Luckily for McCain, he's probably gonna be running against Barack Obama, who seems destined to become a politically skilled equivalent of unelectable Michael Dukakis once the cultural war whores finish smacking him around.

Saturday, May 03, 2008

General Election Predictions

Having seen the geographical battle lines formed in the contentious Democratic primaries, I feel as though I already have the information necessary to predict how the states are likely to go in November. I'm no longer convinced that Obama will be the Democratic nominee, even though he's still odds-on to get it, so I'll include hypothetical faceoffs for Obama v. McCain and Hillary v. McCain, in that order. I'll elaborate on some overarching themes after the predictions....

Alabama (McCain by 25, McCain by 28)
Alaska (McCain by 19, McCain by 46)
Arizona (McCain by 22, McCain by 16)
Arkansas (McCain by 26, McCain by 2)
California (Obama by 8, Hillary by 12)
Colorado (McCain by 4, McCain by 9)
Connecticut (Obama by 7, Hillary by 7)
Delaware (Obama by 3, McCain by 1)
Florida (McCain by 12, McCain by 7)
Georgia (McCain by 16, McCain by 19)
Hawaii (Obama by 17, McCain by 2)
Idaho (McCain by 37, McCain by 61)
Illinois (Obama by 17, Hillary by 8)
Indiana (McCain by 20, McCain by 19)
Iowa (McCain by 3, McCain by 8)
Kansas (McCain by 19, McCain by 29)
Kentucky (McCain by 36, McCain by 20)
Louisiana (McCain by 25, McCain by 20)
Maine (Obama by 6, Hillary by 4)
Maryland (Obama by 18, Hillary by 11)
Massachusetts (Obama by 5, Hillary by 16)
Michigan (McCain by 2, McCain by 2)
Minnesota (McCain by 2, McCain by 3)
Mississipi (McCain by 24, McCain by 27)
Missouri (McCain by 15, McCain by 8)
Montana (McCain by 22, McCain by 40)
Nebraska (McCain by 25, McCain by 46)
Nevada (McCain by 3, McCain by 5)
New Hampshire (McCain by 2, McCain by 3)
New Jersey (Obama by 1, Hillary by 7)
New Mexico (McCain by 2, McCain by 3)
New York (Obama by 10, Hillary by 18)
North Carolina (McCain by 13, McCain by 17)
North Dakota (McCain by 18, McCain by 39)
Ohio (McCain by 9, McCain by 4)
Oklahoma (McCain by 41, McCain by 33)
Oregon (Obama by 1, McCain by 2)
Pennsylvania (McCain by 5, McCain by 2)
Rhode Island (Obama by 6, Hillary by 19)
South Carolina (McCain by 17, McCain by 21)
South Dakota (McCain by 20, McCain by 35)
Tennessee (McCain by 30, McCain by 13)
Texas (McCain by 20, McCain by 23)
Utah (McCain by 40, McCain by 65)
Vermont (Obama by 14, Hillary by 9)
Virginia (McCain by 9, McCain by 13)
Washington (Obama by 6, Hillary by 3)
West Virginia (McCain by 34, McCain by 11)
Wisconsin (McCain by 3, McCain by 5)
Wyoming (McCain by 41, McCain by 62)

Total (McCain 348, Obama 190) (McCain 362, Hillary 176)

So overall, Obama would be a stronger candidate than Hillary, losing by a slightly smaller landslide due to victories in Hawaii, Delaware, and Oregon that I think would be denied to Hillary due to, respectively, anger towards taking away the nomination from the native son in HA, disenfranchising the substantial black vote in DE, and upsetting the youth vote in OR. If Hillary gets the nomination now through a superdelegate coup d' tat, millions of blacks and young voters will sit out the election, rendering her electability argument useless. On the other hand, the white working class, and Catholics in particular, will NEVER warm up to Obama, taking Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania off the table right away, and turning usual Democratic strongholds like Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New Jersey into nailbiters. And while Obama currently appears to have a lead in the Upper Midwest, that region will be the first to bail on him with the drip-drip-drip of pseudo-scandals/gaffes, particularly with an alternative as seemingly benign as McCain to fall back on, leaving Illinois as the only state not bordering an ocean that Obama will win in the fall.

As for McCain, he'll win seniors by a 25-point margin against Obama, and a 10-point margin against Hillary. And it's doubtful that his age will cost him a single vote this fall. The only people pounding on it will be youthful Obama supporters, which will trigger an even deeper backlash in favor of the senior citizen in the race.

For all the talk of how this election was a sure thing for Democrats, it never really was. As I said in last week's entry, Democrats only win national elections when it's by accident. Now matter how low Republicans may seem on paper, they always have the advantage due to their mastery of wedge issue demagoguery and identity politics segregation. Had we been in a position to nominate a slightly less controversial candidate than either of the two remaining choices, we would still most likely lose, but we'd less likely to face the Dukakis-style landslide on our horizon.