Reporters and Obama's Lead in the Polls

Why Are Reporters Surprised By Obama’s Narrow Lead?
http://news.yahoo.com/s/politico/20080806/pl_politico/12334

Senator Barack Obama is the first American of African descent to have a realistic opportunity to become the President of the United States. Given two hundred years or more of slavery and another hundred years or so of an American Apartheid, this fact alone is remarkable, both to Americans and to the rest of the world where all kinds of slavery and Apartheid still exist in large doses. Racism, after all, has not been abolished in American hearts and race still matters to too many people, although voters have grown much more wary about sharing their true feelings to pollsters or to each other on this sensitive subject.

Given this reality, the amazement of the situation is that he is leading at all and not that he cannot win decisively or in a landslide. There was never any way that an African American candidate was ever going to win a landslide vote the first time around, no matter how miserable the failure of the Republican Administration. If he were running directly against George Bush, he might well be a few more points ahead, but he is not running against George Bush and Senator John McCain is by far the best Republican candidate for distancing the Republican choice from the current Administration.

There is some, not easily estimated, percentage of the American electorate who will not vote for Barack Obama because of who he is – both racially and otherwise. It is no longer socially acceptable to be a racist, at least not in polite society, so people keep their private views of the subject to themselves. Many of them will not tell pollsters over the phone how they really feel, that is for certain, but they can freely express their feelings in the choice of their candidate – in this case, Senator John McCain. For a portion of these voters, particularly working class white males, their feelings are so strong that it will override their own economic self interest, although they probably use cognitive dissonance to resolve the contradiction.

Therefore, and it is pretty simply math, Senator Barack Obama has to overcome this bloc of antagonists, some of whom traditional vote Democratic, with a bloc of protagonists who represent a new constituency for the Democrats. There is no other way for him to win, albeit narrowly and probably not by more than five points at the most.

The Power of the New Constituency:

Obama is going to need every vote he can get from those under 35, who have much more tolerant views of racial issues, other African-Americans, Latinos, and moderate and educated Independents and even Republicans. To do precisely this, he has built and mobilized the single most effective campaign organization in American political history. Three of these groups are made up of people who are less inclined to participate in elections than the voters, who are supporting McCain – older, more settled, more involved in their communities, better educated, etc. Obama has to turn these voters out in numbers not seen in any recent elections, a formidable challenge.

Ironically, the most difficult and inaccessible of these groups are the African Americans and Latinos who reside in the large urban ghettos (and some rural areas of the South) that still are part of the landscape of American politics. These neighborhoods are mostly represented by old line Black and Latino office holders, whose organizations look a lot like old time political machines, although less effective. An army of middle class Blacks and Whites is not likely to be effective in some of these areas, and it is simply not clear whether a dramatic increase in turnout is even in the interest of the office holders who represent these voters, whether they are African American or not.

At the same time, a substantial victory among these groups, particularly the White voters under 35, is a very substantial threat to the Republican Coalition for years to come. Moreover, the successful mobilization of these voters, in large numbers, will add margins for Democrats at every level of office. McCain simply has no ability to capture a majority among the younger voters, other than the Evangelicals, and a substantial loss among the youth vote hangs on for a long time in politics (see earlier Blogs).

Challenging for the Center is More Reliable:

An equally important strategy for Senator Obama is to go after the Center in American politics, no matter how much that enrages some of his more liberal and left wing supporters. A centrist strategy is always the way to win in American politics, although Democrats seem to have had a harder time doing this than Republicans. When, instead, a Democratic Presidential candidate does as George McGovern did in 1972, it invariably proves disastrous.

By temperament, Obama is very well designed to do precisely this. He is measured, calm, reasonable, sensible, and balanced – traits that have come through rather clearly over the course of the primary season. McCain, by contrast, is a well known hot head, given to great fits of temper on occasion and even intemperate remarks. Today, unlike a year ago, Obama is also “tested” by the most intense primary campaign in American history, a fact that will now work to his advantage.

On policy issues, Obama is catching some real breaks that are helping him to reposition to the Center. On foreign policy, the Center and events have simply moved to him – a reasonably prudent withdrawal from Iraq (sixteen months sounds fine) and a shift to stabilize with more military support the youthful government of Afghanistan (which everyone now seems to applaud). Both McCain and Bush have been forced to embrace withdrawal, but not on a time table to anyone’s confidence or liking.

The rapidly rising prices of oil and gas, coupled with enormous oil company profits that are undermining the credibility of the oil lobby, have shifted the focus on energy to the national security issue that it is. The country ready for and is up to a new challenge, and shifting our economy from its fossil fuel dependence simply no longer sounds radical at all, but very sensible, in spite of the propaganda to the contrary from the oil and coal lobbies.

This large an undertaking will require a multiplicity of policy changes, and brokering the deal is likely to be the first major challenge facing the new Administration. Obama is in an ideal position to broker this deal, particularly because he has taken so little money from any of these powerful lobbies and because he has large constituencies in the Democratic Party (and among Republican moderates) who will support him on a brokered deal. The single interest lobbies – oil, coal, ethanol, wind, solar, nuclear, etc. – are all going to have to play a changing role in this plan going forward (without any veto), but there must be an honest broker to make it happen, and that certainly is not John McCain nor could it ever have been George Bush.

On the central issue of the economy, however, the situation is much more difficult. In truth, neither McCain nor Obama are talking realistically about the economy, and they are smart enough to know the game they are both playing. McCain promotes the complete fiction that we can solve our problems through the elimination of so-called “wasteful spending,” and he would keep all of the tax cuts in place. Obama promotes the complete fiction that we can raise all the money we are now spending by taxing just the rich and that is equally preposterous. There just flat are not enough rich people to close the budget gap, even if we taxed them at 100 percent. Moreover, the more they tax capital and dividends, the greater will be the decline of investment capital in the small businesses that produce most of the new jobs in the United States. The policies of the Democrats are almost invariably designed to placate organized unions, particularly the public employees, and they seem to be consistently unsympathetic to strategies that genuinely create new jobs in America, not matter what they claim to the contrary.

Virtually everything both candidates saying on the economy is posturing for the purpose of winning votes, with little semblance of reality. As a former businessman, it is obvious that neither of them ever met a payroll, never raised and spent someone else’s risk capital, nor understands the simple fact that the engine of job creation in America is small business, which converts invested risk capital directly into new jobs.

The real danger with both candidates is that they will do something dramatic, precipitous, and dangerous in economic policy changes that will throw the economy into reverse, creating a more dramatic version of the problems they already have. Good “politics” frequently is not good “economics.”

This Election Will Stay Close Until the End:

Baring a major stumble by one of the candidates, this election is likely to stay relatively close all the way to the end. The voters have had more exposure to both candidates than is usually the case before September, and voters are more fixed in their preferences than you would normally expect at this point. Despite the silly, poorly executed tracking polls, Obama seems to maintain a 5 to 7 point lead over McCain, but he has not been able to expand on that even with very favorable publicity during the summer.

Although both candidates can say that race does not matter, it still does, and there is a constituency of unknown size, particularly among working class White males, that simply will not vote for Barack Obama in 2008. At the same time, it is very difficult for McCain to overcome the huge deficiencies of the Bush Administration. There is an even larger constituency who feel that the past eight years are among the worse governed years in American history, that that constituency is unlikely to embrace John McCain, even if uncomfortable with Barack Obama

Personally, I expect the campaign to get pretty ugly before it is over, partly because it will remain so close. There is a generation of Republican political consultants, trained in the Karl Rove School of political viciousness and character assassination, who work with a variety of interests in the Republican Party. I expect that we will hear from them loudly and clearly before this is over.

This is usually the tactic of October, when it is hard for the opposing candidate to respond with the amount of time left in the race. The media loves this really nasty campaigning, no matter what it pretends to the contrary, and they becomes the hand maiden to the distortions, repeating them endlessly in the hopes of making things interesting, while Senator John McCain will distance himself from the attacks. It worked with John Kerry in 2004, and it has worked elsewhere. The theory is that if you throw enough filth, some of it will stick, particularly if it is close to the election leaving little room for a response. The Republicans are very, very good at it, even if John McCain disavows it.

Just my opinion,

Gordon Black