Posted by
Steve on Wednesday, September 24, 2008 1:34:34 PM
The polls right now are volatile. They change radically from day to day. That means there is a large part of the people that have not made up their mind on who to vote for. I read on Hugh Hewitt that the number of undecided voters is about 18. That is a lot of undecided voters.
The undecided voters want to make a change from George Bush. We have had 8 years of George Bush and the media has drummed it into everyone’s mind that even one more second of a George Bush term would be unacceptable. In looking at the candidates they see two different choices.
Barack Obama is an unknown factor. Even though the main stream media has been building him up for the last two years, voters do not know much about him. That is because there are large parts of his background where the main stream media will not go. We are still unsure of where he stands on a lot of the issues. The Democrat party has put out a lot of white papers that say what the Democrat party wants us to be, but Barack Obama has been very vague about what he wants. It does not matter much what the Democrat party wants once Barack Obama gets into the White House. He would be calling the shots and the Democrats would line up behind him.
John McCain, on the other hand, is well known. He has been around for a long time. His big problem is that he is a Republican like George Bush. I think that McCain has effectively defined himself differently than George Bush. That should help. The economic problems right now are playing into the hands of Obama and hurting McCain. It is easy to lay the blame for this at the hands of Bush. He is the President and the President gets the blame for everything that goes wrong.
Unfortunately, the truth is not that Bush is at fault. George Bush and the Republicans tried to reform the mortgage industry in 2003 but were stopped by the Democrats who said there was no problem. The Republicans also warned of the crisis in 2004 and 2005, again they were stopped from doing anything by the Democrats in Congress. Also, the reason this miss is so bad at all is the fact that the Democrats saw an opportunity to try social engineering without any danger. So, the Democrats passed bills that required the lenders to give loans to people who could not pay them back. We are now reaping the problem that the Democrats put into play years ago.
Both sides have an opportunity to take advantage of this “crisis”. Obama has to keep the focus on the Republicans as the problem. McCain can come in as the fiscal conservative and be the savior of the system with minimal governmental input. That would be the way for McCain to win this election. If McCain plays this right, he can cement his fiscal conservative credentials and blow Obama out of the water. Sarah Palin can continue to pile on during the Vice Presidential debate over the big spender Joe Biden. Right now, it is McCain’s election to lose.