Morning Campaign Grab Bag
by Steve Soto
There’s a whole range of things to talk about this morning, so let’s roll out several of them at once.
New Fox/Rasmussen polls in several states (and to a lesser degree a set of Time/CNN polls) show that Obama is making things more difficult for McCain/Palin. And the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll shows that the electorate feels the Democratic ticket has won the debates. When the political historians look back at this race as to what tilted it against the GOP, there will be a multitude of reasons. But aside from eight years of GOP catastrophe and a bad economy, the Palin pick and the scorched earth tone of the GOP campaign will figure prominently in the analyses of what went wrong for McCain. And he has no one to blame but himself.
If McCain was still holding out hope that Pennsylvania would be a lifeline to him, maybe not. Things don’t look good for him either in Ohio, Virginia or North Carolina either.
Jeffrey Feldman over at Frameshop addresses something that the mainstream media has heretofore ignored: the McCain/Palin ticket, in its effort to stay away from dealing with voters’ concerns about the economy, has been reduced to using dangerous rhetoric in front of true believers. I’ll go a step further: as we get closer to the election, you will be able to count the number of nonwhite faces at McCain or Palin appearances on one hand, if any at all. And Dana Milbank of the Post notes the same thing, but also mentions that the GOP lumps the media into the hostility as well. See, it’s never the fault of the GOP that they screw up, it’s always someone else’s.
The Democratic brand is running ahead of the GOP in the most competitive red congressional districts right now.
Richard Cohen of the Post says what has been obvious to the rest of us: despite the outright lies and other questionable things Palin said last week at her debate, the media wrongly still treats her as a credible candidate instead of as a fraud. And Eugene Robinson notes that the GOP wants desperately to shift the dialogue away from the issues and towards Obama’s character, as if we didn’t see this coming weeks ago.
There will be no surprise tonight when McCain goes negative against Obama, and he may harm himself if he appears to be using every angle to attack Obama in his answers. For his part, Obama needs to stay cool and deal with McCain's attacks, calling them out for what they are: shots from a desperate campaign that cannot offer anything of substance to Main Street except smears and tax cuts.
What Obama could do however is use the Fed's and the Bush Administration's latest bad idea against McCain and the GOP. With the "rescue" still only days old, why are we already talking about soaking the taxpayers again, this time to pay off Corporate America's unsecured debt? Where is the direct bailout of Main Street? Why isn't anyone talking about paying off the credit cards and unsecured debt of everyday Americans and rewriting Main Street's bad mortgages? Before we spend another dime for "top-down" corporate welfare or corporate tax cuts, Obama should introduce the idea of doing something directly for wage earners themselves this time.