Sunday, October 26, 2008

The Losing Line...

Remember Hillary's "We're in it to win it?"

Ah, yes, the good ol' days. Seems McCain's saying the same thing now:

WATERLOO, Iowa – Republican presidential nominee John McCain is dismissing the sour poll numbers that show him trailing in his race for the White House against Democrat Barack Obama and says his campaign is "doing fine."

McCain, interviewed Sunday on NBC's "Meet the Press, said his campaign has pulled closer to Obama's in the last week. And McCain says he'll continue to be "very competitive" in many of the states the two senators are focusing on.

Recent polls have shown McCain trailing Obama both nationally and some of the battleground states. A Newsweek poll released Saturday showed McCain behind by 13 percentage points.

Questioned about his standing, McCain said the race is close and insisted that he's in position "to win it" on Nov. 4.
Let's hope not, John. You've shown pure disdain for about ninety percent of this country, and we just can't afford you and your party any longer.

Denial. Not just a river in Egypt.

5 comments:

cool yiddishe mama said...

You know you're screwed in an election when one of your campaign advisors" pre-voted for "that one"!

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/239703.php

"Conservative legal scholar and Reagan Solicitor General Charles Fried, who just endorsed Obama, isn't just a Republican. He's actually one of McCain's campaign advisors.

Before they cycle down the memory hole, here's Fried on McCain's Honest and Open Election Committee and Justice Advisory Committee.

Key to his decision was McCain's "choice of Sarah Palin at a time of deep national crisis."

Kylopod said...

Is it just me, or does anyone else get the feeling that Powell's endorsement inspired all the recent endorsements we've been hearing from Republicans? It's as if he made it legitimate for them to express their views aloud.

cool yiddishe mama said...

I would have to agree with you on that one. I saw in WSJ (of all places) a most unlikely headline: Bernanke Endorses Obama. As you know, "Uncle Ben" is a Republican yet officially, the Fed is required to act non-partisan.

Obama is the best person to get our country back on track. He has inspired previously political apathetics (like our own Barak)and he has strong crossover appeal. As we get closer to Election Day, it's becoming clearer to a surprising number of Republicans.

Am Kshe Oref - A Stiff-Necked People said...

Did you see FiveThirtyEight.com?t They give Obama a 96.7% chance of winning! If you go there and scroll down a bit, there's a post with a vid of an Colbert interview with the guy who runs the site. Pretty cool.

And yes, I think once Colin Powell endorsed Obama, the rest of the more prominent and respectable Republicans have been coming out of the woodwork, knowing they now have a support system and that they will NOT be standing alone...

Kylopod said...

I've been reading 538 for some time. The founder, Nate Silver, is a sports analyst who got into election statistics this year and received publicity for having correctly predicted some of the primaries against what the pundits predicted.

He has developed his own system for predicting election results. While I don't understand it entirely, I think it involves averaging all the surveys but weighting each one using factors such as historical success rates and sample sizes. (Though I did get an A in differential calculus and passed many other advanced math courses in college including two stat courses, I'm not exactly a math wiz--too many numbers and my head starts to whirl.)

The site does not only print statistics, but includes political analysis by Silver and some other bloggers. Silver has spent many posts attempting to debunk the theory of the Bradley Effect--the theory that a white candidate will exceed polling numbers against a black candidate because respondents will lie to pollsters to avoid seeming racist. My own hunch is that Obama will be the one who exceeds polling numbers next week.

Silver is unabashedly pro-Obama, but he aims for objectivity. His political analysis clearly tilts leftward even though he tries to make his statistical analysis bias-free. It will be interesting to see how closely his predictions match what happens next week. If McCain somehow wins, it will appear to discredit Silver's analysis in many people's eyes. But if Obama not only wins but does so by a margin very close to what Silver predicts, he'll be set for life.