Its hard to know where to begin on all the bullshit dished by Dem strategist Bill Beckels in this article. A lot of what he says about Democrat trends would be valid with any other candidate, were Obama not the standard bearer. In fact, his analysis would be a pretty good fit with Hillary as the candidate. With all the negative press the Republican party has been getting its not strange the country is down on the GOP.
And no, its not intrinsic problems with the party, I don’t give a fuck what the radical right says, they are completely wrong that the Republicans need to tack right. The country swings like a pendulum, and the heyday of far right conservatism, which probably peaked in 2004, is going the other way. If Romney (a fake far right candidate, but the wingnut right is happy to claim him because he’s all they have) were the candidate, even a stiff like Obama would be trouncing him.
The American public seems to react against extremes, and if you paint a candidate an extremist, he’s toast. That’s why Obama is probably doomed from go, even in a bad year for Republicans. Its impossible to paint McCain this way, and that’s why he’ll win.
Getting back to Beckel’s bullshit, there are lines like this to justify why he thinks Obama will win (in a landslide, no less)
Pennsylvania has 200,000 unregistered black voters and we should count on a minimum of 100,000 to register and vote. By November, 250,000 new voters will turn 18, a group that has voted 60% + nationally for Obama. The fastest growing Pennsylvania demographic group is college-educated, white-collar suburbanites. We know who this group supports. Don’t count on a massive disaffected rural blue-collar vote against Obama. They are the smallest and lowest turnout demographic in the state.
Ok Beckel, then why did Obama get his ass handed to him in the Penn primary? And about those 200k unregistered black voters: why did they not bother to register for the very important primary, yet they will jump up and register for the general. Lastly, no matter how many unregistered and potential black voters you claim in Pennsylvania, there are 10 times as many white voters. There are always 10 times as many white voters, and they are obviously quite hostile toward Obama, and its getting worse.
The “fastest growing” line is laughable. I don’t care how fast they are growing, unless they are rabbits they aren’t going to increase their number enough to offset the very real aversion to Obama in Penn.
My gut feeling is that Obama will not only lose Penn. and Mich, he will lose NH, Colorado and Iowa and possibly Minn. The depths of Obama’s weakness are just barely beginning to be plumbed. The more the country sees of him, the worse he does.
The worst thing about Clinton staying in the race is she presents an alternative to those who don’t like Republicans, but they just can’t stomach Obama. McCain is a very non-threatening Republican who will be palatable to many, many white voters who have come to the realization that the only reason Obama didn’t want to inject race into the election is that it would expose his very hateful and divisive stance on the issue, every year of his political career until this one.
Among other hyperbolic laugh-lines by Beckel in his whistling past the graveyard piece:
Michigan is highly unionized in a year where unions will spend more and be more active for Democrats than at any time since the halcyon days of the 1950s. “Uncommitted” in the Democratic primary almost beat McCain’s total vote – and that’s when no Democrat campaigned in the state.
Oh really? They weren’t active and didn’t spend money against Bush in 2004? The entire canard that Dems are more whipped up this year than in 2004 is, pure and simply, bullshit. They had a very real and venomously hated enemy in 2004: George Dubya Bush. McCain just doesn’t live up to that. Oh sure, partisans like Beckels will try to rev up animosity toward McCain, but McCain just won’t
play along.
He’s been making noises about glowball warmism and immigration that are very hard to paint as hard-core conservative. This enrages the Malkinite wing of the GOP, which is just dying to go down in flames, as if that will vindicate their position that McCain is wrong for the party, but it has no basis in reality (much like most of Beckel’s piece).
Beckel’s article would be a pretty fair assessment of the fabled generic Democrat, but is useless re: Obama post: the Wright kerfuffle. The damage of the Wright affair is profound and goes right to the heart of race relations in the US. I think most fair-minded Americans, white and black, are willing to concede that while there are lingering vestiges of racism in America, we are making great strides. Wright and his ilk make their bread and butter pushing the narrative that things are actually worse now than in the ’60’s, and that white people are not only wrong-headed, but evil. Obama has single-handedly set race relations back decades, in that he has stoked resentment and backlash of white people who don’t like being labeled racist, simply on the basis of the race, which is, of course, itself a racist trope.
Americans also don’t appreciate being lectured on race by a guy who attended a racist church and subjected his young daughters to the most vile racist cant their entire young lives, and himself drank that Kool-aid for 20 years. They are going to take this resentment out on Obama come November.
Obama himself comes across as not just an elitist, but as a big-headed primadonna who can’t take criticism, who accuses anyone who criticizes him as a racist, who throws around accusations and charges recklessly, who is a far left ideologue who paints anyone who disagrees with him as hating him because he is black. This is not a prescription for building a winning coalition.
The perfect storm that is going to beat Obama is that to win, you have to whip up your supporters with enthusiasm for your candidacy and against the other guy. The Dems have picked the one candidate, and the Republicans the one candidate, who works in this way for the GOP and against the Dems.
Rank and file Dems just aren’t going to be that enthused for Obama. And they just aren’t going to despise McCain enough to fight hard to beat him. Granted, the Republican base isn’t going to be mad crazy to elect McCain, but they are probably going to go to the mats to defeat Obama.
The Bradley effect on Obama has yet to be fully ascertained. Personally, I think its going to be worth 10 pts. in the polls for McCain, and this is much more than is needed for a landslide. McCain consistently draws 3-4% more than Obama nationally, and that kind of lead translates into an electoral landslide.
Beckels’ other points are equally as weak; that Colo. and Virginia are trending Democrat, that Obama will win Ohio, etc. etc. In any other matchup, he’d probably be right. But with these two candidates, it just doesn’t stand up. And in four years, all bets will again be off. Does no one remember the reports of the death of the Democrat party in 2002 and 2004?
All extreme far field prognostications are pretty much guaranteed to be wrong, while short term guesses are much easier to be proven and justified. All signs currently point to an Obama defeat, and it doesn’t take much extrapolation to make a good argument that he will be beaten badly, perfectly setting up Clinton for 2012. McCain may very well be a one-termer, on the basis of his age (he very conceivably might not live 4 more years), Republican president fatigue, world events, the economy, etc. etc.
Democrats might be steam-rolled this year, but they won’t be again in 4 years, no matter what you hear about Obama building his legislative record and etc. He isn’t the type to buckle down and work hard: he’s more of a John Edwards type. He’s in for instant gratification, he’s going to put it all on the line this year, and he’ll be ruined and probably out of the Senate in 2 years if he doesn’t win this time. Political rock-stars, all glitz and zero substance, have a very short shelf-life, and the backlash when he loses is going to be brutal.
The Dems are being steamrolled this year because they can’t afford to alienate blacks. Without the monolithic black vote, the Dems are not a national party. This is a fact rarely admitted in the MSM, but its true none-the-less: Dems never win a majority of the white vote, not even close, not even back to LBJ.
They fucked up badly with their primary rules, and Obama’s fluke and Clinton’s incompetence allowing him to win 11 uncontested caucuses and primaries in mid-Feb handed him the “deserve” label long ago, and started the “mathematical impossibility” canard long before it became a literal truth. In fact, its still not true. Clinton is not going to be mathematically eliminated until Obama actually gets the number he needs.
This has been a lie masquerading as common wisdom by Obama supporters who want Clinton to drop out because she makes Obama look unelectable every time she runs against him in a primary. They are accustomed to winning elections by acclamation with the assistance the MSM. The “wishing makes it so” theory is very much in play with the Obama supporters.
The cold hard fact, which Beckels surely knows, even while he spouts crock of shit articles like this, is that far from being enthused and pumped up by Obama, the electorate is suspicious and antagonistic toward him. McCain does not fit the bill of the evil right-winger that could be used to gin up hostility against the GOP. So, the lesser of two hatreds is McCain, and it will hand him the election.
In a perfect world, with the best, moderate and non-radioactive candidate, against a hard-core right wing ideologue, a black man would have a hard time winning. Against a true centrist and uniting candidate, and having all the baggage Obama brings to the table, it will be well-nigh impossible.
McCain is going to win. The only risk is predicting a landslide for him. Trends point more for it than against, and McCain is well positioned to win in a landslide, and Obama is probably going to gravely damage the Dems down-ticket. In 2 years, maybe they will bounce back, maybe the regular pendulum effect will reassert itself and the Dems will have missed their chance as the toxicity levels toward the GOP recede.
What will be truly satisfying will be the recriminations as the Dems again get the label of being the party that unfailingly flushes its chances down the toilet, of the Clintons, who are now hated and reviled by a lot of Dems start crowing “I told you so!” and the gnashing of the teeth of far-right conservative wackos like Malkin and Limbaugh over McCain’s centrist predidency.
All in all, a pretty satisfying result.
McCain will win with a broad unity coalition, much as Obama advertises but can never deliver.