Can he still do it? The polls are tightening but RCP.com still has Obama crushing McCain. But where does RCP get that number? They get it by averaging in polls from political porn mags like Time and Newsweek that show Obama is more popular in the US than Kim Jong Il was in the last popularity poll taken by the Pyongyang Intellegencer. The guys who tried to use fake memos to torpedo Bush in the last election and still haven't acknowledged that they might have made a mistake are running a poll that shows a wide Obama lead. Oh really?

What advocacy group ever took a poll and came out with an answer that showed that their position was unpopular? According to the Sierra Club's poll we are all dying to abandon our cars and take up subsistence agriculture with the help of our animal friends. The Heritage Foundation finds an American population gazing fondly at the Constitution and yearning for a constructionist judiciary. The Tuna Foundation finds that tuna is the most popular fish. The New York Times finds that America is lusting to vote for Obama. Can we believe any of them?

We cant even believe the ones that show a very tight race, the one's that have consistently shown this to be a very tight race with a swing to McCain when Palin appeared on the scene and a swing to Obama when the market crisis erupted. But the numbers in these polls have always returned to an inside-the-margin-of-error squeaker. What does that show? It shows a large group of very soft supporters who are truly conflicted about where they are going to end up.

The frightening economy is a big plus for Obama. The line coming from the Obama camp that this chaos is a result of Bush's tax policies might be a total lie but it is unrefuted by the feeble McLame and it hits home. Who could look at that wizened piece of gristle Ted Stevens skulking away from his seven felony convictions and not have anything but contempt for a party too stupid to demand that this fossil not run for re-election when he was under indictment and on his way to his 84th birthday party? People just aren't going to vote for someone as repulsive as Stevens. When 'The Torch' Toricelli was in a similar situation in New Jersey, a state where future convicted felons make up a huge proportion of the state government and even a larger percentage of the electorate, Bill Clinton appeared to make sure 'The Torch' did the right thing and dropped off the ballot. He was replaced by a vacuous, grinning half-wit named Lautenburg (pronounced Lousy-burg). Yes Lousy-burg wears adult diapers and drools at his desk in the Senate but one of his attendants makes sure that he is a reliable vote for Harry Reid and the boys. The Republicans haven't lost their brand they've lost their way. So its asking a lot for anybody to vote voluntarily for this pack of inferior schlubs. The average air conditioning repair man knows a weak-kneed, greedy, valueless incompetent when he sees one.

Meanwhile, across the aisle here is this shiny new candidate and this party behind him that are attempting to hide their inner Stalinism behind a facade of center-left populism. They ran a convention where all the usual loudmouths were silenced and an attempt was made to appear concerned about the lives of their taxpaying helots. Those clever Democrats are confident that the Great Unwashed will continue to not notice that states whose governments are controlled by Democrats have the highest unemployment, the highest taxes and the biggest deficits. States where sales and property taxes rise as policemen and firemen are cut from the rolls as crowds of felons are handed voter registration cards and released early from prison because protecting public safety has become too expensive. The Democrats are confident that their ability to pretend to be honest moderates instead of the corrupt, glassy-eyed, Stalinist social engineers that they really are will get them through another round of elections with vast majorities in the legislature and Barak Hussein Obama happily ensconced to lead the social revolution from the White House.

But that pesky internet has changed everything. Thats where most people get their information these days. They get e-mails from their friends that direct them to clips on U-tube. U-tube has changed everything. You can see any event without any commentary from your betters in the media. Clips like Obama's little talk about redistribution on NPR get millions of hits. So did his argument with Joe The Plumber. What a message to Blue Collar America that was! We're going to take your wealth and spread it around, buddy. These blue collar types know that after the trillions of dollars that supposedly have been spent to cure poverty the poor people don't look any more prosperous than they did a generation ago and they recognize 'spreading the wealth around' as the euphemism for highway robbery that it is. Meanwhile people are U-tubing the Wright sermons and all of Barak's various statements about sharing the wealth. They're seeing Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid doing a victory dance on the corpse of the Bush Tax Cuts and thinking about just how high taxes can get...

If polls like Zogby and Gallup go into this weekend showing the gap that they show now then McCain will win the election. If Obama hasn't closed the deal by now then what the polls are showing is the very normal reticence that any normal human would feel when faced with the necessity of voting for a sawed-off, stuttering, incoherent, Wrinkly Old White Dude like McCain. I freely admit that I have the same feelings myself. Where I part ways with many people is that I'm not going to let my healthy contempt for our cross-eyed ole Maverick cause me to vote to put a slicked-up version of Leon Trotsky in the White House. I think a lot of people are going to have the same problem and they are going to end up, like me, having to face the ugly prospect of living the rest of their lives knowing that they voted to put John McCain in the White House.

It was 1929. The market had crashed. But then, like a miracle, hope was rekindled in the hearts of a terrified nation when President Franklin Roosevelt went on TV and...er, wait a minute! Is this History or just the latest Biden gaffe? He seems to make at least one a day. One of my favorites, and one which ensures that I will always have a warm spot in my heart for Joe, was his statement that the Obama ad that mocked McCain for being unable to use a computer with the hands that were broken and smashed while he was being tortured by the North Vietnamese friends of Bill Ayres and Bernadine Dohrn was 'horrible'. The usual backing and filling occurred to try to redefine the remark as Biden being upset at McCain's vicious attacks.

And the attacks have been extraordinarily vicious. McCain has gone so far that he is actually bringing up votes from Obama's incredibly thin record! During the entire campaign against Kerry the hapless W never stooped low enough to bring up Kerry's record in the Senate but now McCain has gone completely insane and has sunk to the depths where he is harping on things that Obama has actually done! What kind of crazed, unethical Kamikaze behavior is this? Does he think Obama was the Governor Of Alaska or something which requires a higher level of scrutiny?

Now there has been a dramatic shift in the polls. You see, Obama's record is not relevant but POLLS, now thats the hard-hitting factual basis on which we can base our choice. And the polls have shifted in response to the McCain-Palin surge. The pollsters reweighted their sampling demographics and have produced a much tighter race. They've also produced a totally non-scientific poll where they have determined that most Americans are racists. What makes you a racist? Answering 'Yes' to a question asking whether you associate blacks with violence. Maybe the people who answered 'yes' to this question had just listened to some of the speculation that is common amongst the Rev Wright types in the Black Community who are predicting bloody riots if Obama doesn't win.

Meanwhile, back on the campaign trail Biden makes a stop at a coal-mining town and touts his love for the hard-laboring coal miners. Too bad that he was on tape from two days ago advocating 'no coal plants in America' but saying that we needed to introduce clean coal into China! So China gets electricity and we don't. When the lights start to go out, because the alternative energy the libs are so fond of is uber-expensive and basically unworkable, the government will declare a crisis, appropriate a trillion dollars as a 'bailout' and use that as a blind to seize the electricity industry and turn it over to the Federal Government. One by one the crisis are brought on by idiotic government policies and in the name of averting disaster the government steps in and effectively nationalizes another sector of the economy.

We have now reached the tipping point. The Dems demand that the Fannie-Freddie bailout include the effective nationalization of the financial sector or its no deal. The answer should be the President going on TV and in a national speech BLAME THE DEMOCRATS for the disaster and for the inability to pass a bailout bill. Of course, after eight years of ignoring Democrat lies and power-grabs the feeble Bushy is not capable of any such truth-telling. They say that Bush is preparing an address on the financial crisis but I doubt he's going to throw down the gauntlet. He certainly was completely silent when Pig-losi and Co. passed a drilling ban in congress. This was an issue that could have been loudly pushed to the detriment of the Dems' hopes of holding the house. But that would have been so ...partisan. We're not ...partisan.

Meanwhile back on the campaign trail Obama and Biden are stumbling along making gaffe after gaffe and losing steam. The demographics in the polls can only be tweaked so much and there is a debate coming up between the tongue-tied Obama and a mean old man who has sandbagged better men than Barry in a series of debates. Cast your mind back to the debates between the Republicans, which were pretty sharp and issue-driven and those of the Democrats which were only bidding matches about how much money they were going to hand to various interest groups. HRC was hardly likely to accuse Barry of being a corrupt leftist tied to wacko radicals, just as he was not going to bring up her Chinese contributors. I think we can count on that snarky ol' critter McCain to abandon the Marquis Of Queensbury rules and lure the lightweight amateur Obama onto the ropes.

I cant wait for Biden's post-debate commentary.

I obsessively click on the RealClearPolitics.com electoral map every day looking for states shifting one way or another. The movement is glacial but there has been movement. The 'solid' states, states where there is a ten-point or more margin are either bright red (for McCain) or brilliant blue (for Obama). I always resented that red-blue thing. The Dems would naturally be red in my mind, to match their political philosophy. The whole red-blue nomenclature came out of the 2000 election and I always thought that the media consciously labeled the Republicans red just to deflect any connotations of socialism from their beloved Democrats.
RCP labels any state that has a less than ten-point margin, but still outside the margin-of-error as 'leaning' and uses a paler shade of blue or red to denote these states. Any states that are polling inside the margin-of-error are depicted in gray. You can click on any state to get the list of polls which are averaged to arrive at the number that determines the state's color.
There's a major weakness in RCP's mapping, though. Some of the polls that are averaged into the count were taken in the middle of August, especially in states like California or New York where the smart guys are so convinced of the outcome that there are no real polls being conducted.
But of the states where the polls are recent and done within the last few days the map shows a clear trend; the blue is washing out and becoming lighter and the red is expanding and becoming brighter. Texas, usually a slam-dunk Republican state was light red in August and has now regained its dark red hue. North Carolina has gone from gray to bright red in the last few weeks. Montana had been in the toss-up column during the pre-Palin doldrums and is now light red. Indiana has moved from light blue to light red. Ohio has moved from light blue to gray. Florida has moved from gray to light red. Missouri from gray to light red.
But the most startling shifts are in the reliably blue states. Oregon and Washington have paled to light blue. Minnesota, cursed with a Democratic senate candidate who makes Al Sharpton look like a reasonable moderate, has moved from bright blue to gray. Michigan, the Democratic disaster area undergoing an economic meltdown engineered by its Democratic governor, legislature, congressional delegation, and Senators and further propelled by the suicidal UAW has lost its blue tinge and is now gray. Virginia, a hopeful pickup in the eyes of the Obamanoids has gone from pale blue to gray, Florida from gray to pale pink. Pennsylvania has lost its blue tint and is now lingering in gray land. The most startling of all, Blue Jersey has gone pale blue.
Since the Republican convention NO state has gone from red to gray or red to blue. The trend has been all one way. Its becoming increasingly difficult to look at the map and put together a winning scenario for Obama. But think back six or seven weeks. The map looked a whole lot different. Then it was difficult to put together a reasonable scenario that elected McCain.
Maps can mislead you. Part of whats wrong with politics today is the obsession with local details and key voter groups in swing states and the inability to think that big ideas don't matter in elections. But both Obama's rise and the Palin phenomenon are exactly a result of their ideas and they both moved numbers in areas that previously were considered untouchable. This is no longer an election taking place in the swing states, this is the first national election since 1994, when Newt took congress away from the Democrats. The entire country wants to drill for oil. The entire country doesn't want their taxes to go up. The entire country heard the questions that Giuliani and Palin raised about who exactly Barak Obama was and how unqualified he was for the job of president and is now reacting to his pathetic response. The reply was to equate 'community organizer' with Jesus or Abraham Lincoln, a tack that was so offensive and phony that it highlighted the fact that they aren't able to talk about what he did as a 'community organizer'. So by default people have inserted the image of Al Sharpton and drawn their own conclusions. There is no legislative record. As they've plowed through Governor Palin's life we've gotten twenty times more information on what she did than we ever got about Obama.
I dont believe RCP's map. I think that the campaigns know better. We're starting to see McCain commercials on cable in California. I would love to see an unbiased recent poll in California. Adding in 'The Bradley Factor', the rule that black candidates poll higher than they run, which is stronger in California than anywhere else, I wouldn't be surprised to find out that Obama is even shaky in California. If he can be polling within the margin of error in Oregon and Washington than there is something that people everywhere are rejecting about Obama and the rot is spreading. There is a gravity that is pulling the entire Democratic ticket down with it.
This is a shock. All this year as we looked at the ghastly McCain hijack the Republican nomination and go out of his way to insult conservatives and we saw this charismatic young guy whip the previously undefeated Clinton Crime Family my feelings were of despair. I was so disgusted with the Republican Party that I was ready to vote for a loony like Bob Barr just to send a message to the weasels who it had seemed had destroyed the party that they couldn't count on my vote automatically. It wouldn't have mattered anyhow because Obama was 25 points ahead of McCain in California. At that point the LA Times was publishing a poll every couple of days, proudly showing their beloved Obama trouncing McCain. Those polls have disappeared. The LA Times is notorious for oversampling Democrats and is spectacularly wrong ALWAYS but their lack of polls is more telling than anything else. This will not be a close election. The only way Obama can get out of this hole is not by moving a few key groups in some strategic swing states but by a KO in the fifteenth round. He's not going to win on points.