Aquarian Weekly 8/13/08
REALITY CHECK

OBAMA IN THE UPHILL
Part II
Electoral Map Realities Douse Change Parade

There are many weird concepts the American people are willing to accept; seraphim, truth in journalism, the infallibility of heroism, patriotic duty, lottery tickets, all-meat diets, love, Hare Krishna, humanity; but one thing they are apparently not ready swallow is the next president of the United States being a black liberal one-term senator from the north. The evidence of this is reflected in the current polling data coming out of the individual state counts, which will ultimately decide whether Barack Obama or his Republican counterpart, John McCain will be our next chief executive.

If it is not McCain, we have ourselves a story, bub.

It has been a horrid twenty or so months for Republicans, and their man has spearheaded what many RNC insiders have called a "god awful shit-can" campaign. Yet he survives, while Obama barely leads in polls that your average citizen lies in not appear racist or just plain stupid.

But it's not merely race or the goober-quotient that hounds Obama, as many victim-jockeys offer up in handy excuse form. For decades this country has exhibited a conservatively uninteresting voter block for president. Beyond boredom, there is nothing particularly galling about this, but it is fact - something lost on crazies like Chris Matthews who insist on describing the older, whiter, military candidate as an underdog. Americans generally go for blandly fabricated billboards, certainly not anyone resembling Barack Obama, whether black, red, orange or green.

This is about the time when you'll hear the word radical thrown around. Radical? Obama is about as radical as the next button-down lockstep who runs for high office. You want radical? There is a long frightening list located in the deep draw of The Desk, to be published by autumn.

It is these among other crucial reasons that this race is currently wide open with nearly 170 electoral votes up for grabs, including the standard lynchpin states like Ohio, Pennsylvania, Florida, etc.

Ohio, the most economically devastated state in 2004, loudly resounded that it would rather collectively starve than vote for any pansy liberal. The same people who doomed John Kerry buried Obama by closing their eyes and holding their noses to vote for Hillary Clinton, who'd somehow managed to convince them she was the second coming of Huey Long.

Pennsylvania was not kind to Obama in the primaries either, and although he holds a six to eight point lead now, the money people around his camp are very worried that his failure to secure the Philadelphia suburbs in the spring could eventually tip the state to McCain on Election Day.

For its part, the McCain campaign has taken the bait and dumped twice the cash than Obama on media presence in both states. The silly "Make Obama look like some kind of Biblical myth or celebrity airhead" has made its rounds in places where "uppity" and "arrogant" combine nicely with "elitist" and "lofty" to drum up a significant enough voter fear.

And, for the record, there is no way McCain loses the predominantly senior-laden, Jewish block-vote in Florida to Obama. Democratic 50 to 1 spending and not a single television, print or radio ad run by Republicans has resulted in more or less a flatfooted tie.

The failure to secure even one of these three huge electoral-rich states, ones with Democratic blood on their hands in the past two presidential elections, has sent Obama headquarters scrambling to engage discussions on the Midwest and challenge the heretofore Republican stronghold of the deep south. But early returns do not support this effort. Republicans enjoy double-digit leads almost everywhere below the Mason Dixon line. Let's face it, without uttering a single word, McCain can be confident that most of the South is spoken for.

Only Virginia and Georgia can conceivably lean toward Obama, their cities teeming with a strong African American vote, but McCain still maintains a pretty solid seven-point lead in Georgia and Virginia has never moved more than a percentage point one way or the other. Talk of North Carolina being in play is a media fantasy pitched to drunken lacrosse freaks at Duke for a lark.

Approaching the Midwest, Obama has decent leads in his home state of Illinois and bordering Wisconsin, but inexplicably barely holds leads (Iowa - seven-points) or trails in other border states, such as Indiana (two-points) or is being routed in Kentucky (20 points). Iowa is particularly troubling when considering it was the state that started it all for him in February and hailed him as the Democratic nominee in June, and has suffered McCain's wrath for this ethanol energy business for years.

Prevailing wisdom among the pundit elite, when they are not slobbering all over themselves laying odds on these innocuously vapid VP choices, has heralded Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada as the new Battleground States. Okay, great. Let's have a look how our Change Candidate is doing in the Rockies and the desert.

Colorado, an increasingly liberal state in a time of deep hatred for all-things Republican, has endured a considerable influx of McCain and Obama ads, yet remains even. In a few weeks the Democratic Convention in Denver should boost Obama's flaccid numbers here, but how much will his triumphant acceptance stadium rally on the anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech further paint him as a vacuous superstar? Remember that Obama has every advantage here, not the least of which is a moderate Republican running for governor who has openly endorsed the Democratic candidate.

New Mexico, another state that boasted impressive early numbers for Kerry in 2004 only to swing Republican is also on the bubble. It's governor threw the Clintons under a speeding train too late for the Obama camp, which as a whole sees Bill Richardson as a pusillanimous opportunist who will doubtless end up fucking them if he is not offered the Vice Presidency, of which he most certainly will not.

Finally we have Nevada, which is still embroiled in secret lawsuits from the Clinton hardliners over shenanigans in the scheduling of its January caucus. Once again, in a year replete with doomstruck economic forecasts resulting in rabid anti-Republican fervor, McCain stands dead even.

And while Obama has rapped up most of the northeast sans New Hampshire, which not only resurrected the Hillary monster in February but also simultaneously gave rise to the reanimated McCain Express, looks shaky at best. Obama barely leads in Minnesota (two to five points) and Michigan (four points), which he will certainly lose if McCain chooses Mitt Romney as a running mate, and he is somehow down in Missouri.

It is early August and we have another Inevitable Candidate who does not have the numbers. Things have shifted seamlessly from the Hillary Myth to the Obama Myth.

Someone needs to show this space better state numbers in the next three weeks or it will doubtless take one of the most baffling upsets in recent presidential campaign history to keep John McCain from being the 44th Commander-in-Chief.

It's not about the hoopla. It's the numbers…stupid.

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