[Sean]

Originally Posted by Deckard

What do you think about why the American population is responding this way? Is it down to the effectiveness of the Republicans' goin' negative? Is it down to the simplicity (or as Bush liked to say at the last election, the stark certainties) of their own messages?

I personally believe it's a combination of factors.

One, Obama has been an exciting, interesting candidate, but he's been forced to try to sustain that excitement for over a full year - longer than anyone's ever had to that I'm aware of. Hell, I'm extremely interested in this Presidential race, and I'm feeling a little worn out from it all, so I can only imagine how the more casual voter must feel.

Two, I don't believe the coverage of this race has been quite as clear-cut as either party would have you think. Obama does get more air-time, but the down side of that has been that a lot of it has been squarely focused on negative charges against him that many people are probably believing. McCain's negatives haven't been focused on nearly as much. Remember how long Reverend Wright was the top story? It was literally every day for like a month. Or the "bitter" and "clinging" comments? Weeks of front page coverage. But McCain can screw up about health care coverage of viagra versus birth control, and it's in the news for a day or two. He jokes about killing Iranians - twice - and it's the same thing. His top economic advisor calls Americans "whiners" who are only experiencing a "mental recession", and it lingers for a couple days, tops. And the Republicans pound away at Obama as "elitist" using nothing real as evidence and the press keeps repeating the charge, while when McCain actually forgets how many homes he owns, the "elitist" charge leveled at him only lasts a day. And also on the news subject, the coverage has been far more editorial in nature than factual. Like in his response to Obama regarding the instance of McCain forgetting how many houses he owns that I just mentioned, his campaign says "does a guy who made more than $4 million last year, just got back from vacation on a private beach in Hawaii and bought his own million-dollar mansion with the help of a convicted felon really want to get into a debate about houses?" And yet on the news I watched, I didn't hear any discussion about how this is a blatantly misleading quote in regards to Rezko. They just kept repeating it and repeating it, effectively helping McCain spread his propaganda.

Third, the people who were worried that Hillary's dirty campaigning against Obama might have lingering effects were right, as in this clear example - http://www.breitbart.com/article.php...show_article=1 . She didn't campaign against him as if he was a fellow Democrat - she campaigned against him as if he was a vile enemy that had to not just be beaten, but actually destroyed. In doing so, she set the Republican campaign up very nicely, sowing doubts about Obama in middle America that Karl Rove would be proud of, which he has yet to get past.

And lastly, let's not leave out why I believe so many in middle America have embraced the attacks against Obama from Hillary and McCain, which is because Obama is black. I really don't want to blame it all on race, but I'm certain that there's a large percentage of Americans who are simply still racist. I've been shocked time and time again, seeing it not just in rural "hick" towns in the south, but even here in ultra-liberal Los Angeles, and back where I grew up in liberal Massachussetts. The fact is, Obama has a huge hurdle to overcome with that, and even if all the other factors I mentioned were removed, that would still keep this race close in my opinion.

Originally Posted by Deckard

e.g.1 - new offshore drilling.
McCain is for it. Simple. That's the message.
Obama is for it in some circumstances... but sceptical that it'll really work.

e.g.2 - responding to the question of "when does life begin?"
McCain immediately says: "At the moment of conception".
Obama first says that answering the question is "above my pay-grade", then says he's in favour of legal abortion "not because I'm pro-abortion but because, ultimately, I don't think women make these decisions casually. I think they wrestle with these things in profound ways."

Is this the sort of thing that's costing him? Are the successful US presidential candidates really only the ones who's policy positions fit onto a bumper sticker?

I'm glad someone else said it too. People were gushing about how clearly McCain supposedly "won" the Saddleback interview/debate thing, but that wasn't how I saw it at all. I saw one candidate with realistic, well thought out, nuanced positions, and another with rhetorical, ham-fisted, sound-bite oriented positions. To me, the candidate who seems most thoughtful and potentially effective as President is the winner, and that was Obama hands down. But like you said, McCain's answers wold fit well on a bumper sticker, or more importantly, in a sound bite on the evening news, so people ate it up. It tells us far more about the American public than it does about the candidates in my opinion.

Originally Posted by Deckard

Or, going back to the polls, is this largely fallout from the wrath of Hillary Clinton's supporters? (a WSJ-NBC poll this week indicated that nearly half of her supporters have "yet to embrace Obama"... 21% favour McCain, 27% are undecided or say they'll vote for "someone else.'') I'm pretty sure had her campaign conducted themselves with less desperation and negativity, that Obama would be doing a fair bit better right now. That's not passing the buck or "blaming the woman", it's just a speculative judgment that seems entirely reasonable.

I feel like Hillary supporters are having less affect than I initially feared they would. A small but vocal group is still clearly the biggest group of sore losers in history, but I just don't think there are that many of them. But maybe I'm just being optimistic. Certainly, the people who supported her strongly seemed to be ignorant to the point of delusion, buying into claims of experience that it was well documented she didn't have, claiming that Obama was a racist, or a Muslim despite the fact that in the same breath they'd decry him for not denouncing Reverend Wright, and even claiming that Hillary was running a perfectly clean campaign while it was Obama who was being nasty. So clearly, we're dealing with some truly ignorant nut-jobs here, but I just can't believe there are that many of them who are so over the top. Are there?