Obama Leads McCain in Rasmussen Poll

obama has the edge in all the polls out now. obama will only increase that edge as time goes on. that's how obama does.

The Rasmussen Reports daily Presidential Tracking Poll for Friday shows what may be the beginning of a bounce for Barack Obama. Obama now attracts 45% of the vote while John McCain earns 40%. That five-point lead for Obama is up from a two-point advantage over the past couple of days. Before that, for much of last week, McCain had enjoyed a slight edge.

When “leaners” are included, Obama now leads 48% to 43%. Leaners are survey respondents who initially do not favor either candidate but indicate their support on a follow-up question (see daily results). One week ago today, McCain had the edge over Obama, 46% to 43%.

Let's Show the Idiots the Door this Election

will we be undermined by the stupid people this election? i think not. bob herbert suggests we show the idiots the door. he says it nicer than i did. let's have a real debate about real issues and toss aside the foolishness. this is why it matters.

nyt: The general election is about to unfold and we’ll soon see how smart or how foolish Americans really are. The U.S. may be the richest country on earth, but the economy is tanking, its working families are in trouble, it is bogged down in a multitrillion-dollar war of its own making and the price of gasoline has nitwits siphoning supplies from the cars and trucks of strangers.

Four of every five Americans want the country to move in a different direction, which makes this presidential election, potentially, one of the most pivotal since World War II.

And yet there’s growing evidence that despite the plethora of important issues, the election may yet be undermined by the usual madness — fear-mongering, bogus arguments over who really loves America, race-baiting, gay-baiting (Ohmigod! They’re getting married!) and the wholesale trivialization of matters that are not just important, but extremely complex.

In his book, “Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed?,” Jared Bernstein reminds us that the economic expansion from 2000 to 2006 was something less than nirvana for working people. The economy grew by 15 percent during that period, and the official rates of joblessness and inflation were low. But as most of us know, the benefits of that expansion were skewed to the high end of the economic ladder.

Mr. Bernstein, a senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute, writes: “Over the course of this highly touted economic expansion, poverty is up, working families’ real incomes are down and some key prices are growing a lot faster than the average.”

Steven Greenhouse, the labor correspondent for The Times, has also written a book that examines, among other things, the imbalance in the way the benefits from the expansion have been distributed. In “The Big Squeeze: Tough Times for the American Worker,” he says:

“This is a decade during which the American economy has thrived by many measures, with corporate profits and C.E.O. salaries soaring, yet wages have languished for most workers, and health and pension coverage has grown worse.”

Let the candidates wrestle with this issue of increasing economic inequality, rather than President Bush’s spurious and deeply offensive rant comparing advocates of international diplomacy with those who appeased Hitler and the Nazis.

Let the candidates wrestle with the war without end in Iraq that is not just destroying lives but is taking a toll on this nation’s soul. The war is sapping the resources and energy needed for the hard work of putting the U.S. back on a sound socioeconomic footing.

And the way we are treating the troops belies the pretty words that never get farther than a bumper sticker.

The country that professes to be so proud of its men and women in uniform is playing Russian roulette with their lives by sending them into the war zone for three, four and even more tours. Stop-loss, the involuntary extension of an individual’s term in the military (making them subject to still more combat duty), is another dangerous affront to those who have already given so much. more

McCain Set to Be More American

this is sort of a twist on hillary's campaign -- don't elect the "exotic" one, elect the more electable one. that anyone could win by claiming he or she is more american is kind of a scary thought.

wash post: If the McCain campaign is still trying out songs, there's one by a couple of Brits, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, that it should consider. We have to change the words "an Englishman" to "American" to get it to work, but, that done, the song expresses succinctly and entirely the case for John McCain and, by implication, against Barack Obama:

For he himself has said it,
And it's greatly to his credit,
That he is American!
That he is American!

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the sum total of the Republican message this year. That is why McCain's first post-primary ad proclaimed him "the American president Americans have been waiting for." Not the "strong" or "experienced" president, though those are contrasts he could seek to draw with Obama. The "American" president -- because that's the only contrast through which McCain has even a chance of prevailing.

Now, I mean to take nothing away from McCain's Americanness by noting that it's Obama's story that represents a triumph of specifically American identity over racial and religious identity. It was the lure of America, the shining city on a hill, that brought his black Kenyan father here, where he met Obama's white Kansan mother. It is because America is uniquely the land of immigrants and has moved beyond a racial caste system that Obama exists, has thrived and stands a good chance of being our next president.

That's not the America, though, that the Republicans refer to in proclaiming their own Americanness. For them, "American" is a term to be used as a wedge issue, a way to distinguish their more racially and religiously homogeneous party from the historically more polyglot Democrats. Such separation has a long pedigree: Campaigning for GOP presidential nominee Alf Landon in 1936, Republican leader Frank Knox said that the Democratic Party under President Franklin Roosevelt "has been seized by alien and un-American elements. Next November, you will choose the American way."
read the whole story

Democrats Might Not Need Florida

in the general election, democrats might not need florida's electoral votes, according to this story:

The standard Democratic path is to count on some 15 thoroughly Democratic states like New York and California to deliver about 200 electoral votes, and then focus on winning enough swing states to reach the winning number of 270. One Democratic governor once derided the strategy as competing in 16 states and "then hope for a triple bank-shot to win Ohio or Florida."

But the map is changing. Not only are big swing states such as Ohio looking more Democratic-leaning than they have in years, but a host of formerly red states from Virginia to Colorado look ripe for Democrats to pick off.

The Obama campaign is even talking up their ability to win such solidly red states as Kansas and North Carolina.

"Right now it's a lot easier to see some red states going to blue,'' said pollster John Zogby, but he cautioned that despite the national political climate no one should underestimate the Democrats' ability to lose.

For Republicans, the basic electoral vote math remains the same: lose Florida, lose the election.

So no Democratic campaign will admit to writing off Florida, and the nominee will make enough token effort in Florida to force the Republicans to spend money protecting those 27 electoral votes. Indeed, the hard-and-fast campaign decisions won't come until fall, and then will be guided by week-by-week polling data.

General Election Map and Calculator
Who Can Beat McCain?