your plagiarized caricature of America’s economy isn’t any more accurate than your other distortions. Maybe you can put your head together with Henry B and Dolph T, since you all seem to share the same brain anyway.

The NASDAQ bubble popped just a few weeks after the Microsoft Anti-trust lawsuit hearings had wrapped up in April of 2000. So Bill Clinton was still in office.

67% of the US oppose the Iraq war; he wants to continue it indefinitely (100 years?);

67% of the US is pro-choice; he’s pro-life;

80% or more of the US think we are in a recession and that the current economic policies have utterly failed; McCain wants to continue them;

73% of the US has a bad opinion of Bush; McCain wants to continue his economic and foreign policies.

I don’t think you can be THAT far out of step with the US on every major issue (add in health care, tax breaks for oil companies and the phony gas tax holiday if you want more such issues) and have a serious chance at winning. The GOP will try to make issues out of such nonsense as preachers and lapel pins, but I don’t think their hearts will really be in it. Many evangelicals are talking about retiring from active politics and those are the GOP foot soldiers who have carried them in the past couple of elections. Meanwhile, Obama’s national organization is huge and motivated. And, remember that McCain must hold his temper in for a longer time than ever in his life in order not to implode. Plus, he has to stretch his limited intellect (894th out of 899 in his college class) in the inevitable debates, where he will be tremendously outmatched by Obama, whose intellect is far superior and whose debating skills (initially not all that strong) have been honed by 21 debates with Hillary (and others earlier on).

Think a minimum margin of 55-45 in terms of popular vote — or maybe more. The hardcore GOP goose-stepping kool-aide drinkers are only about 35% and add in some poor white racists and bitter old white women and I still don’t see McCain doing better than 45% and might do as poorly as about 41%.

“Like it or not, Bush tax cuts did propel US into the boom we’ve seen for past 6 yrs. at least.”

Huh? You must the 1% of the nation’s wealthiest the experienced a boom. I haven’t seen many others who experienced that boom.

”
“How are Democrats going to reduce the deficit by spending money on all the charitable schemes that your candidates are proposing?”

Better to spend it here than in Iraq. Haven’t you heard that charity begins at home?

“You don’t want to spend money on war, but you are going to spend the money nonetheless–borrowed money at that, right?”

Duh! Of course we don’t want to spend money on was– especially unnecessary ones. Spending billions on an unnecessary war and helping to build a country whose income has just doubled due to oil prices is dumb.

“How will that bring the deficit down?”

Spending $150 billion less tend to bring down the deficit.

Using it to create new jobs here is a much better idea. Creating jobs here will improve this economy. Creating them in Iraq improves their economy. Not that I mind helping Iraq, but help here first.

The fanciful numbers of Clinton yrs are terribly misleading. Most of those figures came on the back of dot-com bubble which burst soon after Clinton exited the office. Had Clinton retired in 2001 I bet those numbers would be awfully reversed but you wouldn’t dare blame his policies for the debacle then.

I don’t know how Clinton would’ve ever gotten us out of recession with the same policies that essentially thrusted us into one. Like it or not, Bush tax cuts did propel US into the boom we’ve seen for past 6 yrs. at least.

The rising price of oil is an altogether different phenomenon. Globalization, and the rapidly rising demand of oil worldwide is a real challenge that’s causing the soaring gas prices so much so that increasing production cannot keep pace with the demand. Add to it the manipulation by OPEC that’s making the situation worse.

With or without Iraq war, the oil prices would still keep rising at a similar rate. If you stop the war how’s it going to affect the economy? How are Democrats going to reduce the deficit by spending money on all the charitable schemes that your candidates are proposing? You don’t want to spend money on war, but you are going to spend the money nonetheless–borrowed money at that, right? How will that bring the deficit down?

So what’s the Democrats’ solution for turning the economy? Putting more people on welfare?!

Virginia? The state appears to be voting Gov. Warner to Senate. How much of that will rub on the Presidential choice?

Where are the “fictional accounts” in my posts #23 and #29? The Republicans have screwed up the economy terribly over the last 7 years. Facts are facts.

fictional accounts of Republican perfidy and incompetence wont be enough to give Obama the electoral vote. While I’m celebrating the Holiday season in a nice Red State, you guys will be in mourning, and the fallen one will be whining that the E. college is racist.

That’s good news for McCain, since he’s at the mercy of events in Iraq over which he has no control. He just has to hope that there isn’t any sudden deterioration in the situation with Iraq and Iran there, between now and Election Day.

What McCain really has to do on the economy (but I doubt he realizes it), is to remind this new generation of American voters that liberal solutions were tried in the 1960s and 1970s. And that they failed, and that huge failure is why conservatism has been ascendant ever since.

If McCain can recite the history of the Carter years, the voters will start to see parallels with what Obama is proposing. The younger voters who are backing Obama are just too young to remember those years, and need some reminding. We had a windfall profits tax on oil, we had Carter’s synfuels program, and they were flops. McCain needs to explain why they were flops.

Smearing a war hero–terrible isn’t it? You Republicans invented it in 2004 to smear John Kerry–it was called “Swift-boating”.

As for the 100 year remark, that was a perfectly reasonable comment that’s been distorted very disingenously. You should not be blaming McCain for making the comment, you should be blaming the Howard Deans who have so disgracefully distorted it.

McCain - “Reports that he cracked at the slightest pressure and gave away vital military info should not be dismissed.” What reports are these? I have seen no such reports and nor have I heard of anything remotely along their lines. What happened? Did the VC give him a whisky sour and did McCain subsequently blab military secrets? Your “reports” sound awfully dubious to me - and so does your suggestion that they exist - presumably from a reliable source. The facts of his POW time are that he was tortued to the point where his shoulders are permanently hunched forward and that he was given the opportunity to be freed, but declined.

I must say that I found your post to be full of nonsense.

Explaining to the American people how you could so enthusiastically embark on a poorly-planned war that broke the national treasury (I thought republicans believed in frugality?), destroyed the fragile peace of the middle east (I thought you guys were against nation building?) and made America less safe. A lot of democrats (like John Kerry and Hillary Clinton) have had to answer to the same question; Obama hasn’t.

So unless you come up with a good answer and a new vision, Obama could win this one using a page from the Windows XP operating manual as his stump speech.

Obama, with the help of the Daley machine, put together a superb organization. He’s an excellent orator (I’m not talking content, here, but diction and delivery). Obama will manage to exude centrism while at the same time uniting a good part of the Dems. If he’s smart, he’ll have someone like Jim Webb as his VP to appeal to the groups with which he’s weakest. His strategy will be a wink and a nod to the left, and a unity message for the center.

Hillary will campaign for him in hopes of a cabinet post, a Supreme Court seat, or Majority Leader. The disgruntled Dems will mostly come back.

BHO has a problem in a few swing states, which gives McCain an opening, but he hasn’t really been scrutinized–the voters just saw through Romney. Unlike Obama, McCain has a long history. Neither is gaffe-proof.

I give Obama a 60% chance. I’ll probably vote for Bob Barr.

This is frightening!

jb

thanks,
jb

I always want to remind people that this is a guy whose greatest prior political achievement is defeating Alan Keyes. Does he have any tangible political talents beyond the ability to deliver a content-free canned speech and creating a cult of personality among the easily impressed? (Incidentally, I’m also curious as to whether the Cult of Obama will be able to sustain itself through November, or whether many of its members will be distracted by some other bright shiny object and wander off between now and then.)

Still, McCain and his campaign will need to be very disciplined and nimble to take advantage of Obama’s flaws and weaknesses to claw his way to 270. Far from an impossible taks but a very formidable challenge.

It seems to me that the wind behind Obama’s sails has weakened considerably since the Pastor Wright affair and Hillary’s constant attacks. Six months is a lifetime in politics and I am not so sure that Obama will not falter at some critical point when facing the McCaine/Republican onslaught. It’s not over until fat lady sings.

Obama can’t jump over his own shadow: He continually produces revelatory statements of the “global test” variety. A good recent example was just last night, as pointed out by Gatewaypundit and noted by James Taranto this morning, when Obama described energy policy and the oil companies as “funding both sides of the war on terror.” This strange statement seems to have been copied from some extremist-conspiracist manifesto - something for a Ron Paul supporter or a Daily Kos diarist to expound upon. Uttered in the context of a debate, and seized upon by the McCain campaign, such a statement could be devastating to Obama - illustrating his out-of-the-mainstream naivete and ignorance and underlining doubts about his fitness for office.

Obama’s odd references in the same speech to Roosevelt talking to our enemies, or his campaign’s statements yesterday in support of activist judges, his bitter/cling comments from a few weeks ago, and many other stray statements that he’s made that went relatively unremarked upon since they were uttered in the context of the Democratic race, all point to the same pattern: He’s rather uninformed, shallow, and clumsy, and when he’s tired, distracted, or overconfident he falls back on bs and leftist-academic cant. I guess it’s possible that he’ll play a perfect game from late August to November, but his track record is that he comes up with stuff like this on a regular basis - because that’s really where he comes from and really who he is.

Of course, McCain will have to run a smart, tough campaign. That goes without saying. But despite the punditocracy’s firm belief that this is the year of the Democrat, it’s really McCain’s race to lose.

Same can be said about Kerry’s vote total compared to Al Gore’s. It eventually comes down to which states the candidates win not the popular vote. Turnout in NY, NJ, and CA will be more and so perhaps in the other blue states. What matters will be the numbers in battleground states: Florida, Ohio, and perhaps Pennsylvania.

The choice of Veep might affect their particular state too.