Thursday, August 21, 2008

 

They're Panicking Out There

(Couldn't resist the Billy Ray Valentine quote for the title)

People are freaking out because McCain's closed the gap in the national polls. I understand this fear after watching the least involved, least intellectually curious, and therefore in my book least qualified person in the world win the last two presidential elections, but I'm not as nervous about the prospect of a McCain presidency as the average anti-Repuglican (can't call myself a Democrat, even though I do end up voting for them in our ridiculous two choices only system). I think McCain is peaking, even after throwing every ridiculous thing he's got at Obama and abandoning every principle he ever supposedly stood for (if he ever really did). I honestly believe that people are just waiting for Obama to give them a reason to vote for him, which he will begin doing in a very big way next week. And if nothing else, I happen to agree with this post:
Will painting McCain as a hair-trigger hothead who's catastrophically overeager to support the use of military force, and not willing enough to apprise himself of the facts before acting, prove effective in the face of a withering assault on Obama as weak and indecisive?

In one sense, the grand experiment at the heart of the Obama campaign is an effort to win the election by speaking to the voters like adults.
The available evidence does not support the hypothesis that speaking to the voters like adults will work, but since it's never been tried before, it will be interesting to see what happens, assuming Obama can resist the calls for him to go down into the rathole too far. We'll see. The experiment is probably doomed to failure, but I'm willing to take my chances. Maybe people have learned something these last eight years. The absolute implosion of the Rudy Giuliani campaign (how satisfying was that?) is at least one decent piece of evidence that "all fearmongering all the time" no longer works and that people are ready for something else.

Comments: Post a Comment

<< Home

This page is powered by Blogger. Isn't yours?