Obama In The Uphill (Part I)

Aquarian Weekly 8/6/08 REALITY CHECK

OBAMA IN THE UPHILL Part I Superstar/Timing + Liberal/Minority = Longshot

Fresh from his world tour as media darling, Barack Obama, Democratic nominee for president and political rock star extraordinaire, looks invincible. He is charismatic, youthful, and one of the most consummate orators this country has produced in decades; a powerful combination in a year of economic downturn, stagnating progress in an unpopular foreign occupation, and a sitting president with historically low approval ratings. In a time defined by the word CHANGE, he has all but the copyright. Meanwhile, his opponent is an aging, white, military veteran, as entrenched in Washington politics as anyone he competed against for his party’s nomination.

Things could not be rosier for a newbie candidate, whether using the measure of domestic angst, general enthusiasm, or simple timing.

So where then are the cold numbers to back it up?

While Obama was receiving standing ovations from American troops, discussing international ideologies with heads of state from Bagdad to Berlin, and speaking in front of hundreds of thousands of people waving (not burning) American flags, John McCain was on the Today Show yammering incoherently about a magical border between Pakistan and Iraq then sped off to be captured smiling awkwardly from a Food King cheese aisle.

By all matters of reasonable prognostication, Obama, or anyone NOT Republican, should be trouncing McCain, both nationally and, more importantly, in state races; which has always and will continue to choose our presidents.

But he is not.

No matter the poll, even the more radical ones you might find online, Obama barely ekes out the margin of error or is woefully behind. Outside the usual Democratic strongholds like New York and California, and a few scattered in-between, Obama fails to crack the all-consuming 45% range, something a candidate will need to achieve to gain the presidency, unless Ross Perot has another run in him.

Even sacrificial lambs like Dukakis and McGovern had summer numbers better than this. Jimmy Carter, running against a man who not only pardoned one of the great criminals the presidency has known but narrowly survived a savage pistol-whipped by Ronald Reagan to take his party’s nomination, ran double-digits everywhere in the summer of 1976. However, come autumn, he was sweating Gerald Ford. After Watergate had brought the federal government to its knees in constitutional crisis, the squeaky clean Carter barely hung on for victory by less than 700,000 votes; a lousy three percent.

Following Labor Day, when most Americans start paying attention, the entrenched, more conservative choice – the tried-and-true, less wild card candidate – always begins to close the gap. In almost every case since I’ve been on the planet, this has meant the Republican candidate. Now is when Obama should shine, not only in magazines and on the evening news, chatting up Katie Couric or appearing in front of throngs of adoring fans, but in early state polls – indicating which ones he needs to bolster and defend and which to ignore and prepare for humiliation.

No matter the poll, even the more radical ones you might find online, Obama barely ekes out the margin of error or is woefully behind. Outside the usual Democratic strongholds like New York and California, and a few scattered in-between, Obama fails to crack the all-consuming 45% range, something a candidate will need to achieve to gain the presidency, unless Ross Perot has another run in him.

Obama appears unstoppably meteoric, while his opponent reeks of same-old politics. Republicans appear doomed, while Democrats point fingers and rally the troops. Ah, but appearances in the summer of a presidential election can be deceiving, especially appearances not backed up by figures. Numbers have no emotion. No face. They do not bend to wills or are coerced by rhetoric. They are neither starry-eyed nor dismayed. You either have them or you don’t, and right now, anyone paying attention to this contest can clearly see that Obama does not have the numbers to back up the hoopla; of course with the kind of hoopla he’s engendered one would need Julius Caesar returns.

But we are far from that.

As stated very early in this thing, Barack Obama has a ton of unprecedented baggage to carry; an African American, liberal, junior senator with a weird name and a fuzzy New American background. There are long odds this man would qualify for a driver’s license in Mississippi, much less apply for the nation’s highest office. Shit, beyond race and familiarity, experience and political ideology, by any litmus, Obama is the big risk. He is quite literally the Change Candidate; if he becomes the 44th president of the United States, nothing will ever be the same again – for good or ill.

This reporter thinks for good, but that means less than nothing. My backing of Obama is purely generational. He is of my time, and it’s about time to turn pages. Choosing another military grey-haired white protestant repeats what I have witnessed since I began to grasp such things, and none of it is particularly pleasant.

But personal madness aside, success in the presidency has more to do with circumstance, luck, and matters of history, and even that is a heaping bowl of subjective.

Hey, if 9/11 had not transpired perhaps George W. Bush would have been a serviceable caretaker president like the affably lost Rutherford B. Hayes, but it did, and extraordinary circumstances call for extraordinary men. Bush, on the other hand, turned out to be a mediocre, half-assed simpleton. Therefore the record is spotty to poor to downright criminal.

There is no telling about this Obama guy or anyone for that matter. This is why they play the game, jack.

However, one thing is for certain, this is not a country that embraces change without a fight. It is not an electorate open to the new and untried, and this will be to McCain’s ultimate advantage. Soon, as we see transpiring slowly, his campaign will pound this home: New guy is untested and strange, and this equals scary and dangerous. It’s McCain’s best shot, and the early state-by-state numbers bare this out.

Again, never mind these inane national polls, which range from three points to ten. They have proved meaningless in the past and with this wild card candidacy, they are far less than that. Even if he loses, it is probably a good bet that Obama will secure the popular vote. The droves of new Democrats registered during the record-smashing primaries seal it, not to mention conceivably a 50% increase in the youth vote; and that’s coming from a skeptical/conservative prediction. Obama will roll when he takes his states, but conquering the electoral map is a far different animal.

Next week we dissect the hard-core numbers and burst a bubble or two.

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