Seven out of 10 voters (69%) remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama.
According to Rasmussen Reports Dems don’t think they’re trying to help the other guy either.
Interestingly, while 83% of Republican voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama, 19% of Democrats agree, one percentage point higher than the number of Democrats who believe they are trying to help McCain. Unaffiliated voters by a 53% to 10% margin see reporters trying to help Obama.
Forty-five percent (45%) of Democrats say most reporters are providing unbiased coverage in the current presidential campaign, but only 20% of unaffiliateds and nine percent (9%) of Republicans agree.
So, there you have it, proof that Obama supporters are delusional.
Barack Obama’s vice-presidential nominee Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., Wednesday said that Sen. Hillary Clinton, D-NY, might have been a better pick for the position than him.
At a rally in Nashua, New Hampshire, a man in the audience told Biden how glad he was that Obama picked him over Hillary “not because she’s a woman, but because look at the things she did in the past.”
“Make no mistake about this,” Biden responded. “Hillary Clinton is as qualified or more qualified than I am to be vice president of the United States of America. Let’s get that straight. She’s a truly close personal friend, she is qualified to be president of the United States of America, she’s easily qualified to be vice president of the United States of America and quite frankly it might have been a better pick than me. But she’s first rate, I mean that sincerely, she’s first rate, so let’s get that straight.”
Spokesman Ben Porritt offered this response from the McCain camp: “Barack Obama’s most important decision of this election and Biden – the candidate he selects – suggests himself that he wasn’t the right man for the job and that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice. Biden certainly has a credible viewpoint on this.”
Duh.
And, ouch.
*This is the only clip I could find of the event so far. Depending on your point of view, either ignore the sarcastic laughter, or enjoy it.
“John McCain says he’s about change,” Obama said, before listing issues on which he said Arizona Senator McCain had the same position as Bush. “That’s not change. That’s just calling the same thing something different. You can put lipstick on a pig. It’s still a pig.”
Obama-One-Note has been hyping “change” his whole career. The sad thing is, he’s sincere. Obama seriously believes that if Washington/Chicago/The World would just “change,” he and others could “get things done.” Unfortunately, whether he wins or loses, he’s going to find out that’s not how things work.
His “community organizing” days should have taught him that lesson. Though I left Chicago a hundred years ago, it seems, even I know better than that. Nobody wants somebody to come to them and tell them that if they would just do things his way, everything would be cool. Anyone who tries that approach will likely find himself talking to the hand, then the back, then an empty room. What people in Chicago expect of “community organizers” is for them to be “a guy who knows a guy who can pay a guy” to do stuff for them. The natural response of a Chicagoan to a suggestion that something can be fixed is, “how much is it going to cost me?” The reason they expect this is simple, it works.
The famous “we don’t want nobody nobody sent” line ascribed to Chicago politics is true. When you’re looking for somebody to grease the system on your behalf, you want to be able to trust them. Plus, if it doesn’t work out, you need to have a name of somebody to go to who can make things right.
This is how all politics work. People in Chicago and Boston, Philadelphia and New York simply see no reason to pretend otherwise. Yet, upon meeting this reality, instead of adjusting his impractical ideologies to the process, Obama refused to play along while stubbornly insisting that his failure was the fault of the system. The system exists because the system works. Obama’s failure in it is his own.
Sure, he has had to compromise his idealized principles along the way, but only to the extent that it moves him along the path he’s chosen to prove himself right. Sooner or later though, he’s going to have to adjust. As Steely Dan said in their hit Show Biz Kids,
“While the poor people sleepin’ with the shade on the light
While the poor people sleepin’ all the stars come out at night
Stars, snakes and all manner of predators work best in the dark. While everyone benefits if the predatory beasts are fed, no one wants to actually see them feed. Or take a chance on becoming dinner themselves. Rather than being duped, the “poor people” are active participants in the process; as long as the Washington snakes are making their sausage in the dark, the “poor people” can sleep easy until they need to “find a guy.”
To be sure, there are things that need to change. As Hillary Clinton discovered when initially attracted to the Alinsky-style organizing Obama seems to embrace, sometimes its more practical to make small changes to the system from within. Obama on the other hand, seems hell-bent on working up the system for the purpose of over-hauling it, stripping it to it’s bare bones then remaking it in his image. The flaw in this ointment is that while he may have the best interests of the “poor people” in mind, the “movement” required is not being driven by them, it is being manufactured and exploited by Obama. Thus his “people powered” government plans of public service, including civillian defense are likely to be met with the same hand, back, empty room sequence his small scale organizing did. After all, if I’m going to do all the work, what do I need you for?
America, including black America, is not eager for a revolution of the type Obama envisions. Letting the black guy from Chicago run things for a while is about as much “change” as they’re looking for. If Obama was really smart, he’d try to be “the guy” and stop trying to “change” the “poor people” who are looking for “a guy of their own” to help them while they sleep “with the shade on the light”.
Be the star, Obie, stop trying to bring the light.
Yesterday, facing questions about Barack Obama’s shrinking poll numbers, Camp O went into full “We ain’t ‘fraid of no polls!” mode:
“The notion that people are swinging back and forth in the span of a few weeks or a few days this wildly generally isn’t borne out,” Obama told reporters during a campaign stop in Riverside, Ohio.
David Plouffe, responding to a Washington Post reporter about the WaPo/ABC News poll indicating white women were abandoning his boss in droves, went on the attack:
“Your poll is wrong.”
It remains to be seen whether the WaPo/ABC poll, along with all the other polls showing a dip are wrong. But there doesn’t seem to be any doubt that the Obama forces are scared. And rightfully so. Sarah Palin is a nightmare of the Obama camp’s making. For some reason, it’s taken them and the media this long to realize what any PUMA could have told them months ago: since white women have never liked him very much, this is what you could expect without Hillary Clinton on the ticket.
Quinnipiac University Polling Institute Assistant Director Peter A. Brown said the Obama campaign is fooling itself if it discounts the importance of the problem. “This isn’t about Hillary; it’s about Obama’s problem with white women voters,” he said. “Hillary won about 10 million votes from women voters in the Democratic primaries — there are 52 million women voting in the general election.”
Like most frightened animals, Team O has predictably lashed out at both the source of their fear and those who call them on it. Like most frightened animals in this predicament, they’re apt to make potentially fatal mistakes.
Today, Obama fell into the trap of trying to extricate himself from a trap by yelling at the trap. Never works:
Speaking at a high school in Norfolk, Obama took a few moments to address what he calls “the made-up controversy” of the day, Amie Parnes reports.
Obama said the McCain campaign moved to “seize an innocent remark and take it out of context because they knew it’s catnip for the news media.”
Of course, The Mac Attack was just waiting to pounce:
“Barack Obama can’t campaign with schoolyard insults and then try to claim outrage at the tone of the campaign. His talk of new politics is as empty as his campaign trail promises, and his record of bucking his party and reaching across the aisle simply doesn’t exist.”
Speaking on the House floor, Tennessee Rep Steve Cohen sought to defend recent attacks over Obama’s stint as a community organizer by picking up a recent blogger refrain, that “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus.”
Al Capone and the Black Panthers were community organizers, too.
Long, long ago, in the days of black and white TV, aired a classic episode of I Love Lucy, starring Lucille Ball, with guest star Harpo Marx. The “mirror routine” they performed was a tribute to an even more classic scene from the Marx Brothers’ movie “Duck Soup.” We are living in a real-life political replay of this comedic gem, where one character befuddles another by imitating his/her every move, this time starring Barack Obama and Sarah Palin.
The premise of the skit is that the character being imitated (Obama) can’t quite figure out what’s real. Is the image replicating his movement a true reflection, or some kind of prank?
In this case, it’s both.
Sarah Palin makes an excellent Harpo. She knows she doesn’t have to say anything, she just has to be. As long as she stays in Obama’s mirror, everything he does becomes comical. She’s not him, but as his mirror image, she might as well be.
The beauty of the skit is that once the imitated character (Groucho/Harpo/Obama) buys into the farce, there’s no escape. Even when he does something unexpected, the Harpo/Palin character simply scrambles to catch up, further messing with her rival’s head. Unless the mirror image gives up the gag, or an outside force interferes, the laughs just keep on coming.
Palin and her Republican scriptwriters show no signs of letting up. They have successfully cast Obama in the hapless funnyman-in-the-mirror role, and no matter whether he catches on or not, he’s at their mercy until they let him off the hook. And since Camp O’s options to flip the script are now as limited as their imaginations, there’s not much left for us voters to do but sit back with a bowl of popcorn and a beer and let the hilarity ensue.
And everybody knows it, except Democrats.
