Posted by
Bob Wood aka TrekTek on Saturday, October 11, 2008 4:55:02 AM
He points out this is a Democratic year, but we knew that because that is all we have heard from the media throughout the campaign. President George W. Bush is very unpopular, we are told. Even some of the conservative pundits that we have all known and loved for many years have been so preposterous as to suggest that Alaska's Gov. Sarah Palin is unfit to assume the Presidency. The stock market is in the tank, and the federal government has taken over large chunks of the real estate and insurance industries and is making noises about tkaing over the banking industry. All of this in violation of the United States Constitution.
In spite of all of this, Barack Obama has been unable to close the deal! He was barely able to win his party's nomination as he continuously lost ground to Hillary Clinton in the final months. He was simply able to run out the clock, protecting a lead he built in the early primary and caucus states.
You would think that the polls should be showing him with very respectable double-digit leads over McCain. In spite of the fact that various polling units always seem to oversample potential Democrat voters, the polls still show the race within striking distance for McCain. There are, as Dr. Hanson points out, several reasons the race is not over.
The economy is "in dire straits" to hear the media tell it, and our willing populace believes that the sky is falling. Just one week ago, Congress passed and the President signed into law the pork-laden bailout bill to "save Wall Street at the expense of Main Street." Wall Street responded like it was a bailout, didn't it? The Dow dropped 18% of its value. Apparently, Wall Street was not impressed. Investors may have seen the "bailout" as a way for government to take even more control over the free enterprise system, which it was.
After a week in the doldrums, investors showed some signs of life with rapid market swings of 1,000 points before closing down 128 points. It was more than 700 points down at one point in the day, and even managed to make it to the positive at least once yesterday. Analysts said that investors found many of the stocks tremendously undervalued and bought up the bargains. That is the way free markets work, and there is no real reason to believe the markets will continue to slump all the way to election day.
Hanson says:
McCain must keep reminding in simple fashion that Freddie and Fannie were catalysts that drew in the Wall Street sharks: crooked officials cooked the books to get mega-bonuses; they got away with their crimes by lavishing money on mostly Democratic legislators (including Obama); and hand-in-glove they all covered — and still are covering — their tracks under a reprehensible politically correct cynicism.
As Americans, we have an unfortunate inability at times to focus on more than one thing at a time, and the economy has our attention at this particular moment. If the economy turns around, and it has always has, we will have to find something else on which to focus our attention. More importantly, the news media will have to find a more dramatic story to keep its consumers attention.
Iraq is no longer front page headline news as it was during the primary season when Democrats were falling all over themselves trying to outtalk each other on the "failed policies of the Bush Administration." Remember all of the "I support the troops but not their mission" quotes from the contenders? The tide has turned since the surge, elections have been held, the government has been instituted, and Iraq is almost ready to discard its water-wings and swim on its own. al-Qaeda Iraq which was once 12,000 strong is now down to about 1200, and it is mostly contained in one location. Hanson says, "The military is not broken, but now the most experienced, battle-hardened force in the world." Rather than accept the defeat that Obama and the Democrats once touted, American forces - which won the war in a matter of days - is now winning the peace that is so much needed in the region.
The question of Obama's associations with too many questionable characters and organizations like ACORN, Ayers, Rezko, Wright, Pfleger, and Khalidi, leaves a bad taste in many peoples' mouths. This is not guilt by association as his campaign would have you bellieve. The heart of the matter is still character. A person of good character would never associate with these types of people for extended periods of time. Once knowing the background and ideologies of such bottom-feeders, most of us would break any such ties immediately.
Hanson says:
...the public tires of all the media slant, the celebrity rants, and the shills in popular culture, that in concert hourly berate, beg, threaten, and ridicule voters on behalf of Obama. We are supposed to accept Obama’s apotheosis, replete with Latinate seal, Greek columns, biblical injunctions about the seas and atmosphere, and prophesies that he is The One whom we have been waiting for. The creepy effect of ordering us to accept our own salvation becomes cumulative. So there is a quiet unease among the voters, as there always is in America, when someone finger-points and lectures them what they must do — or else!
We are already hearing complaints from the Obama camp that the McCain campaign has been using racist rhetoric to impugn their candidate. Not once has this been demonstrated to be true. McCain has actually been too kind to "my opponent," refusing to even call him by name until recently. The Obamaniacs were so expecting to hear a comment in every speech that they could decry as racially tinged that they came to the game prepared with their own spin. When it didn't happen, they just haven't been able to help using their prepared defenses anyway.
Senator McCain and Governor Palin received a wakeup call in Waukesha, WI the other day. One man said he was mad as hell and that, as our representatives, McCain and Palin had better get mad, too. The socialists are taking over our country step by step, he said, and we are not going to take it any more. One lady was mad at the bailout and urged Senator McCain to name the names of, investigate and prosecute the guilty parties. For the first time, he actually responded with the names of Dodd, Frank, and others at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The crowd roared.
There are millions of us just like these two folks, and McCain-Palin need to make that connection. We know John McCain and his record. We do not necessarily like everything he has tried to do in his long Congressional career, but we do know him to be an honest and honorable man who loves his country. In spite of more than two years of campaigning and two memoirs, we still don't have a good picture of just who Barack Obama is. We see very little in the way of any significant accomplishments in his career.
Senator McCain can not control all of the events in the news, but he can certainly tell us with enthusiasm over and over that he is one of us, that he wants to help get Washington off of our backs, clean up the corruption in our Capitol, reduce our tax burden, and get Congressional spending under control. And he can tell us that the United States Constitution is not just a suggestion for the way we operate our government; it is the Supreme Law of the land, and that his oath to preserve, protect, and defend it is more than an idle recitation of meaningless words.