This is a Democrat year. Any Democrat will be a favorite to win this Fall. McCain may have a ceiling of forty-five to forty-eight percent and he is not a strong campaigner who faces the prospect of being outspent heavily.
Still the Democrat Party seems doomed, like some cursed Tolkien character who cannot evade his fate, to do everything they can to give the old war hero hope.
McCain can win and Pennsylvania shows why. Sadly, despite his many great qualities, Senator Obama is a creation of the extreme left of American academia. He is a tone deaf campaigner for any group not already in his coalition. He has associates that would have already destroyed a lesser candidate.
Tonight may confirm that Obama polls better in big states than he runs. Polls had him losing by six percent and at the moment of this writing he is losing by ten.
I hope it is not racism, but fear it is. Nothing is sadder and nothing is more disgusting, if that is true. This is occurring in a Democrat primary. What will happen in the general?
Nobody can blame Republicans for this trend. Republicans are not doing it.
One hopes it is merely the fear of being labeled a racist that makes voters lie to exit pollsters, but I fear not. It makes me want to vote for Obama in reaction, but that too would be wrong. Bluntly, there is no reason to trust polls that say Obama is leading narrowly in the national race.
No Republican should rejoice in this news and all Americans should mourn, but it is true none the less.
The most important emerging fact for McCain is the death of Old Media. Obama massively outpsent Clinton and lost. Much of the cost of the campaign was in old media commercials. That might get you good press with the old media types that campaign workers love to read and hear, but it is ineffective. In the age of Tivo, as Romney learned to his wallet’s chagrin, television commercials are a near total waste of resources.
McCain has the chance to turn necessity into virtue and continue to run a “free media” (read effective) campaign. Obama will raise a Google of money by new media means and waste much of it on old media.
Obama’s money bought him defeat in Pennsylvania.
Finally, rural voters matter. What happened in the Democrat Party primary today would only be more extreme in the general. In a state like California, New York, or Pennsylvania, Democrats run up big majorities in the cities and try to keep it close enough in the geographic majority of the state to win.
Senator Obama may not be able to win enough urban votes in some of those states to balance out a total rejection by other voters. This is not mostly about race, but the same cultural barrier Senator Kerry faced in states like Ohio and Florida. Obama seems less able to negotiate those cultural barriers at the moment.
Again, Senator Obama is an intelligent liberal candidate for president. He is thoughtful and an excellent speaker. He is an average debater at best, but John McCain is well below average. He can win the general, because this is a Democrat year, but the Party of Truman seems poised to run one of the few candidates who will struggle to win.
The Doom of the Democrats is hubris . . . confident that they could run anyone and win they have indulged in ideological passion and have made an easy run difficult.