This is one site that makes me worry. http://www.themonkeycage.org/Can you give me some reason to hope that Obama is not going down in flames like Kerry did in 2004 over the Swift Boat charge? I need some hope to take to Halifax with me. What can I do to help Obama other than donate, wear a tee shirt, put a sign up?
It is unfathomable to me that the American people are so afraid of electing a black man President that they would reelect George Bush for a third term. His approval rating is in the 20s, yet they are willing to return him to office through the guise of John McCain. The American people are willing to suffer more economic disasters, fight more wars, contribute more to global warning, to pretend that its 1955 forever. And electing an older and perhaps less intelligent (if that's possible) George Bush.
What can I do to help elect Obama? What should he do to avoid the Kerry effect? HELP!
10 comments:
Simple. Let John McCain keep running the same campaign he's running now.
If he keeps this up, Obama won't have to say a word between now and November.
Last time I saw a Republican campaign this pathetic was Bob Dole in 1996.
I hope you are right. I read one blog and get upset and then another and get hopeful. Maybe the key is to stop reading blogs!
First off, Patti, I think Democrats need to stop second-guessing themselves. This is what gets the party in trouble more often than not. It's an oversimplification, but not necessarily untrue, that Republicans tend to make up their minds, and then be unwilling to change them. That's not the smartest way to live a life or engage in politics, but it certainly makes GOPers less prone to torpedo their candidates in the home stretch by questioning whether those candidates should have been chosen in the first place. I think Democrats ought to adopt the Republican strategy of making decisions--as we have in selecting Barack Obama to be the next president of the United States--and then sticking to our guns. Self-doubt by some only breeds self-doubt by many. And the Web is a particularly fertile ground in which to plant widespread self-doubt.
Second, I agree with Jim Winter that McCain (aka "Senator Small") is doing his best to undermine public faith in his candidacy. He appears to be flailing around most of the time, unsure of whether to say what he thinks or say what his handlers encourage him to say (this results in an obvious schizophrenia that shows up on camera). One might wonder whether he's trying deliberately to undermine his own chances in November. (I'll leave the final word on that up to psychiatrists.)
However, I believe that Barack Obama is also benefiting from a lot of favorable signs in this race, aside from McSame's blunderings. Obama comes across as a particularly knowledgeable and calmly confident man, a marked contrast to both the angrier-than-thou Senator Small and the current Republican incompetent occupying the White House. Polls that show 76 percent to 80 percent of Americans believing that the country is headed in the wrong direction also bode well for Obama's success in November. So do the tanking of the U.S. economy, endorsements of Obama's Iraq war withdrawal plans by the Iraqis themselves, investigations emphasizing Republican corruption (even in the formerly non-political Justice Department), and soaring gasoline prices (McCain has been in Congress for almost three decades, and the best he can come up with is a gas-tax holiday that has no guarantee of providing consumers, rather than oil companies, with a break?).
McCain may have been a prisoner of war, but that hardly qualifies him to be president of the United States. And little he has done in the last few months--from picking as his economic adviser a man (former Senator Phil Gramm) who says that U.S. economic difficulties are all in our heads, to insisting that he knows better than the Iraqis what is good for their country (didn't McCain previously say he'd endorse troop withdrawals if the Iraqis said they wanted them?)--should give anyone confidence that McCain has the judgment necessary to be president.
We've already suffered through almost eight years of a prez who was never up to the job, and who each day proves that nobody like him should ever be elected to the White House again. I have confidence in Americans to see through McCain's facade of competence and preparedness for the highest job in the land, and recognize him for the petty, angry, and ill-equipped "leader" he really is.
Barack Obama is the best choice we have for president right now. McCain just represents another four years of Bush's failed policies, economic ineptness, and war-making tendencies. Obama represents a hope for change. It will take many years to undo the damage Bush has done. But the fixing has to start right away. And it will only start with Barack Obama in the Oval Office.
Okay, I'm feeling better. Thanks.
It will also help if we don't try to blame a possible McCain win on Obama's father's ethnicity. Obama has a lack of a sense of humor about himself, and a sense of entitlement, that matches McCrazy's, only McCrazy has learned how to fake modesty and a sense of humor. We can get Obama-as-Democrat in by acknowledging, rather more readily than he himself does, that he is not the Second nor First Coming, but simply advocating a less insane policy than McCrazy is contorting himself into. None of our presidents has been fully up to the job, so there's no reason to assume that Obama will be, particularly no moreso than the callow, petty and/or senile recent predecessors (including Carter and Clinton)...and, Patti, do you really think even McCrazy is dumber than Shrub? I find that hard to believe.
It wasn't the swift boats that sunk Kerry, but his reluctance to actually say anything definitive or forthright about the ads, or anything else. Obama's collapse on offshore drilling was more deft, but still a concession of the type I foresee him making all throughout his still-probable presidency.
It would be a dead heat for the less intelligent of the two. McCain finished at the bottom of every class he was ever in. Bush may have bettered that. I'm not sure.
I think McCain's willingness to continue to favor and court the top one percent whenever possible, makes any policy of his more suspect. Obama is strictly trying to please the other 99, a safer policy in the long run.
Never underestimate grade inflation in Shrub's case...
hey, there was no grade inflation in our (Bush's and mine) day. the gentleman's C was just that.
Patti,
You are lucky enough to be in a state that is one of the epi-centers of this year's election. I live in New York, a very blue state, so in '04 I went to Florida for a month to work on the Kerry campaign. Unfortunately we were hurricane'd out--two hurricanes in two weeks, no electric for forever.
If I lived where you lived, here's what I'd be doing: bumper stickers on all family cars, go to headquarters and volunteer. If the HQ is too chaotic (many are) get a list of neighborhoods that the campaign is targeting and go knocking on doors with literature. If the resident isn't registered, hand them a registation form, have them sign it and you mail it or deliver it. If the resident has a question you can't answer, write down the question with their name and address, go to HQ, get the answer and you mail it back to them with a note saying how nice it was to meet them.
If the door to door doesn't work for you, do phone calls. The Obama camp brings people together on Sundays to use their cell phones to call voters. There is so much to do!
In the Kerry campaign, they used me for data entry because the young ones all wanted to do street work and the older ones didn't like computer work.
You just do what needs to be done.
This year I am only going to Florida for ten days because my dil is expecting a baby in NY but I can do something while I am there and will feel empowered for having contributed in a place where it will matter.
That opportunity is right outside your door. Don't waste your time talking to people who are solidly for either candidate. Go find those undecideds and convince them that the choice is between the past and the future. Simple as that.
Terrie
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