Here's One Analysis That Might Give McCain Voters a Spring in Their Step on Election Day 

There is no doubt that this election will be a close contest and every vote will be important in the final count.  Fear, hope, anxiety, optimism and despair are gripping voters of all backgrounds and the country has been plunged into a cauldron of racial politics, class politics and good old fashioned lying for a year and a half.  If Rasmussen or Zogby could correlate blood pressure and heart rate along with voting preference insurance actuaries would be bracing for a run on the hospitals.

Here's how I justify giving McCain the states that are currently painted blue on most mainstream media maps, states that could tip the election for a McCain victory.

Pennsylvania (21 EV), Minnesota (10 EV) and Wisconsin (10 EV): There is every reason to believe that Obama has failed to secure crucial support among union workers (as differentiated from the union leadership) that is so crucial to these blue collar states.  High democratic turnout in the primaries was at a time when Obama and Senator Clinton were going at each other full force.  There will be a lot of Clinton supporters who will simply stay home or jump the fence to vote for McCain.

Florida (27 EV): In the primaries, the ratio of GOP votes to Dem votes was 1.12:1, and Florida is a state in which party politics still drives electioneering.  Also, in the primary election, McCain got a 5.3% better showing than polls were predicting just before the vote, demonstrating that Team McCain knows how to get out the vote in the Sunshine State.

Three other voting blocs will be critical.

Jewish voters have proven to be difficult to poll accurately.  The issue of how Obama will protect Israel may bring many of these voters to a single issue decision.

Florida is represented largely in the military.  All responsible polling has indicated a heavy McCain vote coming from the armed forces.

Immigrants who came here seeking asylum from despotic or communist oppression.  This includes tens of thousands of Vietnamese, Cuban, Haitian, and other Latin Americans who have made their homes in Florida.  Will McCain's efforts to pin Obama as a socialist be in their minds as they mark their ballots?

Nevada (5 EV): Using the primary turnout to calculate the same 'strength-of-base' ratio as I used to predict Florida for McCain, Nevada shows a 2.11:1 ratio of GOP voters to Dem voters.

Of course, McCain also has to win the races in which he is currently running ahead in the polls.  It's not going to be an easy victory, and at this point he has to be considered an underdog.

It is time to simply go and do our civic duty, come what may.

Potentially the Greatest Baseball Blunder Since Buckner in '86

There is no example in American history of a political showcase preempting the World Series, just as there is no example of a sporting event preempting an election. They are once-in-a-lifetime events, and we previously, collectively, considered them to be greater than an individual. Now I wonder if we should just insert 'Obama' between baseball and apple pie.

The very fact that the World Series schedule was already established at the time Team Obama made their media buys shows every indication that they are as out of touch as critics contend, but also that they are showing - again - their predictable ability to take their eye off the ball.

A virtual cone of silence seems to have descended today within the advertising and entertainment trade press on the subject of Obama's infomercial that will air across several networks and is said to have cost the campaign between $3 and $5 million. Still, I was able to find commentary from PRWeek's Ted McKenna, offering some take on the obvious downside of Obama's media blitz.

Enjoying a major cash advantage over the John McCain campaign, the Obama campaign has been able to place advertising in all sorts of unexpected places of late, including video games. Some political commentators wonder whether there might be a downside for the campaign in potentially irritating voters by the practically ubiquitous Obama advertising.

McKenna references Jeanne Cummings' 'Obama infomercial: Smart politics or risky overkill?' piece (Politico.com) in which she attempts to make the point that this strategy of a media blitz helps Obama to avoid "the filter of the media". In fact, it is just as likely that the opposite will occur and that the media will be talking about this for the next few days in the analysis and commentary portion of the story's new cycle. Neglecting the realities of the news cycle will not be the greatest effect caused by this larger-than-life blunder. It will be the backlash of a politicians greatest bugaboo - the loyal sports fan.

I offer the following encapsulated geography lesson for the Democrat nominee's edification. If anyone has his - or David Axelrod's - email, feel free to forward.

For many baseball fans (the last two World Series games received an a little more than 15 million viewers each) the baseball championship is an destination, not an event - a place to which they have been traveling for months, even years. Nowhere is that more true than in Philadelphia, a city whose baseball franchise hasn't appeared in a World Series in fifteen years and hasn't been victorious in one since 1980.

The Philadelphia Phillies hail from... Philadelphia, a large metropolis in the state of Pennsylvania. Pennsylvania is a state in which Senator McCain has been gaining ground in the last week, a state that swung hard for Hillary Clinton and came in weak for Senator Obama in the primaries.

In the opposite dugout are the Tampa Bay Rays, whose fans are clinging on to hope that their team can fend off elimination and possibly play on to win their first championship. Another point of geographic fact: Tampa Bay is in Florida, a state in which the McCain campaign has been gaining ground in the last week, a state that swung hard for Clinton and came in weak for Obama in the primaries, even though the Democrat Florida primary didn't officially count.

I asked myself a question: If my Seattle Mariners were in the World Series, set to play the clinching game and possibly bring the championship to Jet City, and General Motors showered the broadcasting network with enough cash to bump the baseball game for the airing of a half-hour advertisement for the new Yukon hybrid, I would be furious and it would negatively affect my feelings about GM.

When your name is Lenny Bruce you can get away with showing conceit for your audience, not if your name is Barack Obama. In battleground states, walking on eggshells is standard operating procedure when you're the front-runner and inconveniencing sports fans just so you can broadcast another political ad that comes following a tsunami of political ads may just be enough of an irritation to sway precious votes.

Or not. I could be wrong. But if you were Barack Obama, would you feel like you need to take that chance?

Senator Obama's has seriously overestimated the public's appetite for political theater, and similar misjudgments have often placed him in hot water during the campaign. This time, the look for tiny bubbles forming in the pot as the Democrat nominee places himself ahead of the national pastime; and this gives Obama's opponents a chance to drive the temperature to 212 degrees Fahrenheit. Meanwhile, John McCain will continue to smile and point to left field.

I can think of no better reason to vote for McCain.

Brevity is the shortest path to truth.  This one speaks for itself.  I grabbed the story from Fox News.

If that didn't do it for you, maybe knowing that the speaker of Iran's parliament, Ali Larijiani, would prefer an Obama presidency will tip the scales. You can peruse that tidbit at the Telegraph UK site.

Cross-posted at Unequal Time http://unequal-time.blogspot.com

There are large numbers of voters out there who have yet to understand the relevance of Senator Obama's associations with left-wing radical extremists, and his apparent membership in a political party whose platform was radically socialist. I don't blame them, really, because the on-stage Obama talks like a Clinton Democrat - middle of the road; a staunch defender of the middle class and promoter of America as a global economic force. The accusation that he has a socialist agenda just doesn't seem to fit because, in order for Obama's soul to be wedded to the far left, he would have to be lying (gasp!) about what he truly believes just in order to get elected. This could not happen because, as we all know, politicians never lie in order to fulfill their political ambitions.

The truth is that when you turn down the volume on the Obama "White Noise" Machine (yes, that is a direct reference to Don DeLillo's novel, and if you don't get the reference you should read the book), and examine the path of his rise to power, a realization emerges that Obama is not the skilled politician we are supposed to admire him to be, or he is a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Obama's eventual denouncement of Reverend Wright was done only for political expedience, as anyone who reads Obama's Dreams from my Father can learn for themself. (Check it out from the library to avoid putting any more money in Obama's pocket.) He was aware of, and attracted to, the Reverend's extreme beliefs, and they fit in nicely with Obama's own racially-tinted worldview which is described in great, glorious detail in his own words in his best-selling book.

To what extent does Obama share Rev. Wright's feelings about Jews? It isn't entirely clear and Obama has not been outspoken enough in making his differences clear on that specific issue. Perhaps he is satisfied to keep certain communities guessing, using racial politics to his advantage. Or maybe the message he sends to Israel by suggesting that he would meet with Ahmadinejad without pre-conditions is also a coded message of solidarity to the anti-Semitic factions of the left?

Obama's spectacular flamenco dance around the Bill Ayers association is also an amazing display of distraction tactics. Logic and American wisdom are all that is needed to cut through the stagecraft.

If Obama was a mover and a shaker in Chicago politics, and Ayers hosted his coming out party to the Dem apparatus, and he dined on occasion with Ayers and his wife, and he worked on committees with Ayers, and Ayers and his wife were giving interviews to Connie Chung in which they beamed with pride about their terrorist agenda while operating the Weathermen, and Obama was supporting educational programs that paralleled Ayer's own ideas, if all of those things (and more, but I fear that this run-on sentence will soon become lethal) are occurring within the same time scope, is it still plausible for Obama to recite the story that he wasn't aware of Ayers radical beliefs? If so, I think Orwell just lost a side bet with Stalin in the great beyond.

Even with all of the mainstream media assistance, McCain and Palin having turned up the heat on these connections has begun to force the Obama campaign to subject us all to more laughable explanations (see "lies" in your Berlitz Axelrod-to-English Dictionary) and I think the time is right for public common sense to kick in and break the trance in which these snake-charmers have placed millions of Americans.

The event horizon in which undecided voters make decisions is around 4 or 5 days, meaning that whatever the main street or water cooler buzz is in the 5 days leading up to the election will have a large impact on those voters who were not already voting along party lines. Even those who may have professed a decision to choose one candidate over another, might be prone flip-flop depending on late-breaking changes in the conversation.

(Side Note: When you analyze poll numbers, look closely. Obama leads are not as juggernaut-like as one might think from listening to CNN or MSNBC.)

If a late break for McCain is to occur - as happened for Truman and Kennedy - it will come as a result of both campaign efforts and grass roots, friend-to-friend melee. To deny Obama the privilege of making the White House his final stepping stone in a political career that seems to have benefited only Barack Obama, and not the people he has made promises to, each person is going to have to be willing to bravely conduct their own 25-day political campaign.

Unleash the politician within yourself. Be prepared to put your ideas on the line and persuading people you know to consider carefully who they are going to vote for. Keep coming back to this blog and others for talking points. I, for one, will try and give you solid, non-confrontational ways to start these conversations, and we'll avoid the kind of extreme lunacy that turns off the average person. This won't be won by making attacks, it will be won by winning the overall battle of ideas, and that can be done.

Keep coming back in these final weeks of the election season. Send your friends, too. Don't be afraid of ridicule. We all differ in opinions; you have the right to yours, and we all have the responsibility to keep an open mind. Our job is to challenge those open minds that are left in this country and make the case for voting for McCain.

Cross-posted at Unequal Time.

Even if you believe only one of the candidates running for president, it is clear that at least one pair of pants is on fire.

"Liar! lia!" has been both the chorus and refrain from Senator Obama's camp running all the way back to his snatching of the nomination from the jaws of Hillary Clinton. As desperation set in, the McCain-Palin ticket has finally caught on that their straight talk rhetoric begs for straight walk follow-through. McCain has launched an attack against Obama's lies that is short on subtlety and will likely be the deciding skirmish in his campaign for the White House.

When Obama lies - and by that I mean that he denies certain facts, or chooses to play a hide-and-seek game on topics that do not present a strong image to the general public - John and Sarah will no longer avoid using the "L" word. After listening to Biden and Obama smear both of their records and then hold the distortions up for all to see as an example of "lying" on the part of Team Maverick, it's about time they took the gloves off.

I will disclose that I have previously written on the distastefulness of using this potentially slanderous verb - lie - in public discourse. It is the nuclear bomb of political campaigning because of the collateral damage it inflicts by polarizing the electorate and lowering the standards of political discourse.

The verb should only be entered into a campaign when it is clear that a candidate is stubbornly omitting or obfuscating in order to avoid taking any consequences for some action they have taken that the people need to know about. Each politician must make their own Truman-esque decision and will be judged by the voters on whether the end justified the use of catastrophic rhetorical ordnance.

In my opinion, the preconditions to allow McCain to go on the attack, and not wait for the media to catch Obama in lies, have not only been met, but I believe that he is morally obligated to make these charges.

It's a double jeopardy strategy on McCain's part that will only work if McCain can activate that most valuable portion of the human character - common sense. When confronted with an accusation and uncertain facts, the average person tends to want to fill in the blanks to make some judgment of their own. We are all reporters at heart, and when something stinks we are compelled to find the cause.

So far, the public's ignorance of Obama's messy past and the full weight of his ambitions has not met the stink test, because the mainstream media has done a fantastic job of spraying him down with several cans of air freshener every day. At any moment in the news cycle, Obama and Axelrod can select from the pleasing scents of Katie Couric, Soledad O'Brien, Campbell Brown, and a host of other starry-eyed media cohorts to neutralize their unpleasant campaign aromas.

What McCain must do over the course of the next week - and beginning in tonight's debate - is to hold up a big flashing red neon arrow pointing to the steaming pile that Obama has tried to keep the public from getting a deep whiff of. Even media voices who bathe each morning in Eau de Barack won't fight the public if the common sense wakes them up. Just ask Dan Rather.

It is obvious that McCain is prepared to make his case not only that Obama is lying, but that his cult-like following is beginning to take on some sinister characteristics.

In his speech this morning, McCain said, "I guess [Obama] believes if a lie is big enough and repeated often enough it will be believed."

Whoever wrote McCain's speech was deliberately referencing (for those of us in the know) the infamous quote from Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's chief propagandist, who said, "If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it." McCain is willing to risk inciting Armageddon in order to alert us to something much more dangerous than the loss of this election. He seeks to alert us to the abandonment of logic that has fueled the insomnia of many freedom-lovers and has seductively ensnared many Obama supporters in a fog of ignorant bliss.

Americans have always been proud of their individualism, their self-proclaimed immunity to nationalism and fascism. Those movements start when the masses begin to follow without question, to subordinate their own instincts and thoughts to the great good of "The Cause". If "The One" can't even submit himself to a mild vetting, he is not fit to lead. Whatever their final ballot choice may be, voters deserve answers.

Cross-posted at Unequal Time.