For Obama:
In the closing days of his 10-year quest for the presidency, McCain finds it galling that Barack Obama is winning the first serious campaign he has ever run against a Republican. Before Tuesday night’s uneventful event, gall was fueling what might be the McCain-Palin campaign’s closing argument. It is less that Obama has bad ideas than that Obama is a bad person.
This, McCain and his female Sancho Panza say, is demonstrated by bad associations Obama had in Chicago, such as with William Ayers, the unrepentant terrorist. But the McCain-Palin charges have come just as the Obama campaign is benefiting from a mass mailing it is not paying for. Many millions of American households are gingerly opening envelopes containing reports of the third-quarter losses in their 401(k) and other retirement accounts — telling each household its portion of the nearly $2 trillion that Americans’ accounts have recently shed. In this context, the McCain-Palin campaign’s attempt to get Americans to focus on Obama’s Chicago associations seems surreal — or, as a British politician once said about criticism he was receiving, “like being savaged by a dead sheep.”
(…)
Obama is competitive in so many states that President Bush carried in 2004 — including Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico — it is not eccentric to think he could win at least 350 of the 538 electoral votes.
(…)
In 1987, on the eve of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s third victory, the head of her Conservative Party told a visiting columnist: “Someday, Labour will win an election. Our job is to hold on until they are sane.” Republicans, winners of seven of the past 10 presidential elections, had better hope they have held on long enough.
Whether they have or not, they’re about to hand the White House over.
H/T: Stephen Green
