Driving Mr. McCain

There are a couple of interesting stories in today's Washington Post.

This one says that McCain has been achieving a tactical advantage by establishing the issue of the day and forcing Barack Obama to respond. As long as the issue is national security, McCain may be on more solid ground, but how is he going to avoid the pocketbook issues of health care, inflation, and oil? And can you read this paragraph without thinking of McCain's horrendous performance in New Orleans a couple of weeks ago when he stood in front of a bile-green background and smiled as though rigor mortis had set in?

Several Republican supporters of the presumptive nominee said they were puzzled by a series of easily avoidable mistakes, including sloppy political stagecraft and poorly timed comments that undercut McCain's reputation as a maverick.

PRIDE AND PREJUDICE.. WELL, MOSTLY PREJUDICE

This story hits the mark that I established a few weeks ago. Prejudice will have a major impact on this year's election. Race versus age. Will blacks vote for Obama in incredible numbers? Yes. Will that vote take place in states previously safe in Republican hands, such as North Carolina and Georgia. Bet on it. Will the black vote be large enough to give those electoral votes to Obama? Maybe. Will Ohio and Michigan vote for Obama? Maybe, but perhaps not in the numbers that a white Democrat would receive as evidenced by Hillary Clinton's victories over Obama in primaries held in Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Michigan. (While the Michigan primary was held against party rules, and Obama was not on the ballot there, the demographics of that state correspond closely with those of Ohio and Pennsylvania.) We could see Obama shred the Nixonian "Southern Strategy" that gave the South to the Republicans for forty years, only to lose the election in the more conservative areas of the North.

One the other hand, McCain faces the task of overcoming the perception that he is too old for the job. Obama has already made a thrust in this direction when the said McCain had "Lost his bearings". Certainly, McCain doesn't look as dynamic and youthful as Obama does, and sharing a stage with the lithe Democrat will be a visual disaster for the Republican. Regardless of how his mind operates, the effects of years of torture and imprisonment at the hands of the North Vietnamese is obvious, as McCain moves his body rigidly and with evident pain.

Nonetheless, the Democrats had better realize that, historically, the so-called youth-vote has never materialized, while the geezers flock to the polls.

The demographics, tainted by both racism and age-ism, create far too many permutations for any pollster to accurately tease out to make valid predictions at this time. So while today's poll assessment by the Votemaster still shows a healthy lead for Obama on an electoral college basis, I disagree with his assessments for any state where one candidates lead is less than the margin of error for the poll. That puts into play the following states: Nevada, Colorado, New Mexico, Missouri, Michigan, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, a total of 137 electoral votes.

The battle has not yet been fully joined and the issue is in doubt.