The latest Rasmussen poll shows that Pat Toomey has a 45-to-39 percent lead over Joe Sestak. The pollster explains:
This is the seventh Rasmussen Reports survey of the race in 2010, and a review of prior results highlights just how stable it’s been to date. Toomey’s support has stayed in a very narrow range of 42% to 47%.
Sestak’s support has showed more movement, ranging from a low of 36% to a high of 46%. However, most of that movement came as he surged to victory over Specter in the Democratic primary. Other than polling conducted just before and just after the primary election, the Democratic nominee’s support has remained between 36% and 38%.
Eighty-one percent (81%) of Republicans support Toomey, while 70% of Democrats say they’re voting for Sestak. Among voters not affiliated with either major party, the Republican has a nine-point advantage.
Recall that Obama carried the state in 2008 by a margin of 54.7-to-44.3 percent. Obama, in other words, has presided over a 16-point swing in the electorate in that state. And it’s not just Sestak.
Politico reports:
Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell is well aware that the Democrat who wants to succeed him is facing an uphill battle. The two-term Democratic governor said in an interview Wednesday that while he supports nominee Dan Onorato, he knows he’s the “underdog” in the race and the GOP nominee, Attorney General Tom Corbett, “ is still a “tough candidate to beat.” …
Rendell wasn’t shy about listing those home-state House members he believes will have tough elections this fall. In the 2006 and 2008 cycles, Pennsylvania Democrats made remarkable gains by picking up five House seats. In the 2010 cycle, Rendell cited the top five Democratic incumbents he believes are in competitive races: Patrick Murphy, Chris Carney, Kathy Dahlkemper, Jason Altmire and Tim Holden.
As in many states that had of late voted strongly Democratic, the Obama era is forcing the electorate in Pennsylvania to rethink its partisan preferences. Having seen Obama and a Democratic Congress in action, Pennsylvania voters are more than willing to let the Republicans have a shot. It will now be up to the GOP contenders in all these race to make the case for themselves, but the first argument for their re-election will be: look what the Democrats have done.
My advice to Sarah would be to have her coming-out grilling on O’Reilly as soon as she’s ready. She’ll get a chance to answer the tough questions without the lefty bias, and the direct comparison with Obama in the same forum will make her look good.
The McCain campaign is taking on the Media Center Leftists in a way that I wish the Bush Administration had done over the last eight years. And Bush had far more grounds for doing so than McCain.
What the Media Left must be thinking(but can’t say) is “Hey McCain, I thought we agreed to take down conservatism as a political force back in 2000. Now suddenly you’ve backed out of the deal.”
Has David Frum ever argued that Obama/Biden MUST submit to close questioning from the publication he blogs for, National Review?
How about this comment of Obama’s in his “This Week” interview today, where he claims that he considered joining the military when he registered for the Selective Service, but did not because “keep in mind that I graduated in 1979. The Vietnam War had come to an end. We weren’t engaged in an active military conflict at that point. And so, it’s not an option that I ever decided to pursue.” Right. There was no “active military conflict.” But, the Cold War was going on, the Soviets would invade Afghanistan at the end of the year, and the Iranians would take hostage our embassy personnel. There was certainly plenty to do by joining up back then, I think. Obama does not need to offer an excuse for not joining our all-volunteer military, but it’s obvious now that he feels he needs to offer one. As an excuse, this is pretty lame.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0908/13217.html
I am not even a Weekly Standard subscriber, so I can recommend its current online articles with impartiality. And wholeheartedly. The pieces by Hayes, Emerie, Bell (especially), and Barnett (on blog) are, every one of them, as asute and and as insightful a collection of reportage in one location that I can recall. They deserve the widest possible readership. I pay them my sincere compliments.
Emerie points out that McCain is an “honor” conservative, that his instincts are reliably traditionalist, and that his aim is to get the job done. Those are the values of a serving line officer, which McCain was. I believe it is to that sense of achieving a goal that McCain repairs instinctively, especially in crises. The line officer is acutely aware that he is on a team, that team members are, in one area at least, of one mind, attaining the objective. Differences are set at nought. That is called military discipline.
In other words, screw the differences. Get the damn thing done!
Most of us confront matters of life and death only when we drive our cars; and there, at least, other drivers aren’t deliberately setting out to kill us. To a serving line officer, honor or dishonor is frequently a real choice to be made involving living or dying that cannot be avoided.
But a serving line oficer is not a serving staff officer. The line officer’s concern is tactics, not strategy. He may agree or disagree with the strategy all or in part, but the same demands of honor apply tactically. He may even be, with regard to many matters, strategically indifferent AND tactically enthusiastic. The result, one hopes, will be the same.
McCain is proving to be a superior tactician, at least in this campaign and, I’d argue, only lately. But he he is taking a quite unexpected strategic gamble, namely, that the American electorate will, on balance, embrace “honor” before the United States Senate, or, rather that the one is in some unforeseen way a necessary condition for the other.
In his disagreements with them on strategy, McCain alienates most Republicans. By the same measure, of course, he must attract Independents and a small number of Democrats. How fall the scales when those contradictions resolve themselves is the question. The Sarah Palin pick (as inspired, by God, as no other I can remember!) is exciting precisely because it might restore the esprit d’corps so dear to John McCain’s heart to America. But do not sprint for the goal until the ball if well fielded. Today, September 7th, we simply do NOT know how our dear Sarah will ultimately affect the race for President.
And we do not know if John McCain, the strategist, is a utopian Don Quixote, that voters will not put getting the damn thing done before how the damn thing is done. I myself tend toward litmus-test Conservatism. I believe that such an approach is, logically, what it means to be a Conservative; and I fear that McCain overlooks the degree of unity-despite-difference that exists a priori in a squadron of fighter pilots. That is not the America I reliably encounter.
At the very end of “The Rules of the Game,” a character says, “Life is tragic because everyone has his own reasons.” McCain has finally made me understand his.
Andrew Sullivan and the Berserker Left help propel Palin. Nick Cohen explains:
My colleagues in the American liberal press had little to fear at the start of the week. Their charismatic candidate was ahead in virtually every poll. George W Bush was so unpopular that conservatives were scrambling around for reasons not to invite the Republican President to the Republican convention. Democrats had only to maintain their composure and the White House would be theirs. During the 1997 British general election, the late Lord Jenkins said that Tony Blair was like a man walking down a shiny corridor carrying a precious vase. He was the favourite and held his fate in his hands. If he could just reach the end of the hall without a slip, a Labour victory was assured. The same could have been said of the American Democrats last week. But instead of protecting their precious advantage, they succumbed to a spasm of hatred and threw the vase, the crockery, the cutlery and the kitchen sink at an obscure politician from Alaska.
For once, the postmodern theories so many of them were taught at university are a help to the rest of us. As a Christian, conservative anti-abortionist who proved her support for the Iraq War by sending her son to fight in it, Sarah Palin was ‘the other’ – the threatening alien presence they defined themselves against. They might have soberly examined her reputation as an opponent of political corruption to see if she was truly the reformer she claimed to be. They might have gently mocked her idiotic creationism, while carefully avoiding all discussion of the racist conspiracy theories of Barack Obama’s church.
But instead of following a measured strategy, they went berserk.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2008/sep/07/uselections2008.republicans2008
“The McCain camp cries foul as Obama plays the victim card once again. I fail to see the rationale behind Obama’s tactics: no matter how they might stir his base, they are equally likely to rile McCain’s supporters and turn off working class, white swing voters.”
Does it not matter to you that Obama’s statement is honest but McCain’s is dishonest? Obama says that Republicans are spreading the rumor, and this is true (in fact, interestingly enough, you’re featured in right wing publications with many of these people, which makes you remarkably hard to take seriously on this issue). The McCain campaign was the one that falsely claimed that Obama had said McCain’s people were responsible.
But I suppose accuracy isn’t what pundits are all about: just innuendo.
Obama can be goaded! That bit about “not making stuff up,” can be turned against him by Palin in regards to Obama’s abortion vote.
Here’s an interesting tidbit for comparison, an example of an anti-war, liberal Congressman, without executive experience, failing at the job of mayor: Ron Dellums, Oakland.
Generalized press bashing has limited usefulness. Citizen Kane can always strike back. At least now, with the Net, he lacks the control he used to have. But the” NYTimes” rule is dead. Murdoch crippled it, now the liberals are finishing it off from the other side. Welcome back, William Randolph.