Obama's Margin

What's it going to take to push Obama over the 50 percent mark?

He just completed a tour of the Middle East and Europe and was welcomed throughout as a conqueror, a liberator, as a breath of fresh . . . well, he wasn't George Bush.  And that was good enough.  Jordan's King Abdullah personally chauffeured Obama from dinner to O-Force One.  Sarkozy all but filled out an absentee ballot in making his preferences known for the upcoming election.  200,000 Germans waved American flags at Berlin's Victory Column as he assured them that this is their time as well as ours.

Back in the states, Team McCain stewed.  They bemoaned the press's love affair with all things Obama.  They countered video of Barack's triumphal speech in Berlin with footage of McCain taking questions at -- it might have been the Piggly Wiggly, I'm not sure -- in Bethlehem.  That's Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, not the one with the manger.  They ran ads claiming Obama would rather lose the war than the election and would rather work out than visit wounded troops.  Patently absurd but, hey, the Straight Talk Express ain't what it used to be, is it?  Basically, they ceded a two-week news cycle to their opponent and were reduced to nitpicking his performance as he tap danced across the world stage, winning friends and influencing people.  It was like watching a bunch of old maids critique the swimsuit competition at the Miss America contest.

So where's the bump?  How can Obama create some space in this contest?  

I suppose he could choose a running mate -- beat McCain and the inevitable Romney to the punch.  But it's not like his options are all that exciting, either.  Here's a list of possibilities and why Obama hasn't snatched one up yet:

Hillary -- too Clinton.  Her Veep negatives poll as high as her positives.

Biden -- too Beltway.

Richardson -- too brown.  Barack's got enough trouble trying to win working whites already.

Edwards -- too many kids.

Bayh -- supported the war.

Bloomberg -- too rich, sort of Republican.

Sibelius -- not Hillary.

Webb -- Tailhook.

Rendell -- unwilling second banana.

There are more -- Virginia governor Tim Kaine, retired general Wesley Clark -- but no one who makes your heart skip a beat.  Certainly no one who's going to push the polls.

Which is the point, finally.  Nobody votes on the vice president.  Kaine, Rendell, Biden -- all fine choices but they're not going to help (or hurt) Obama's chances.  Clinton might be a big enough name to throw some weight around but it's going to cut both ways.

The only thing that's going to drive Obama over 50% is voter registration and turnout.  Kids, African-Americans and Hispanics.  He needs blacks to comprise at least 13% of the total vote, up from 11% in '04 and 10% in 'oo.  Assuming at least 130 million vote ( a fair assumption, considering 120 million voted in the last election and registration is off the charts), that would mean around 17 million of them will be African Americans, up from around 13 million in '04.  

According to a New York Times/CBS News poll taken on July 16, Obama is currently favored over McCain among blacks by a margin of 89-2.  He leads among Hispanics 62-23.  McCain holds a 46-37 advantage among whites.  If Obama can hold, or improve upon, those margins, as well as continue to attract new voters to his campaign, he won't have to worry about those tricky "hard-working whites" that claim they don't know him yet. 

I'm not talking about all blue collar whites.  It's the voters the Obama campaign is specifically targeting with its most recent mailer that are problematic.  The ones that are still asking questions like, "Does he wear a flag pin?"  "Is he a Christian?"  "Was he sworn in on the bible?"  "Was he born in America?"  That sort of nonsense.  Sure, there are people out there who don't pay much attention to politics until election week, but I don't think they're the one's doing the asking.  These questions are code for, "Do you really expect me to vote for a black man?"  And while the answer to each question in the mailer is "Yes," the honest response to their ultimate question is "No, I guess I probably don't."

The people-just-don't-know-him-yet argument won't fly anymore.  Obama's been a front-page, prime-time story since at least January.  I keep hearing about how Americans are much more comfortable with John McCain, that they just have a feel for how he'll perform as president that they don't have yet for the the new kid in town.  Well, I'd be willing to bet the average man on the street could actually tell you more about Barack Obama than he could John McCain.  That he was born in Hawaii and brought up in Indonesia.  That he was raised by a single mom and his grandparents.  That he was a community organizer in Chicago after law school.  That he opposed the war.  McCain?  Take away the Hanoi Hilton and the Surge from his narrative and what do you have?  I suspect 4 out of 5 voters couldn't identify a single biographical or legislative accomplishment of note.  Of the other 20%, half would identify him as a maverick, campaign finance reformer and the other half would label him a flip-flopper.  How can anyone honestly say they feel comfortable with who he is?  He's pivoted 180 degrees since his last presidential run.  Maverick?  I don't think so.  He's a guy with a temper who likes to tell dirty jokes.  

People are uncomfortable talking about the racial aspect of this election.  There was much hope that Obama's Philadelphia speech in March would initiate a national dialogue which would begin to heal the scars of our racial divide.  The enthusiasm lasted about a week before the discussion was dropped.  Other than a half-hearted debate about whether Obama's Appalachian Problem was race-based as Hillary rolled him in Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Kentucky, the subject has not, for the most part, been revisited.

I'm not sure Obama can transcend race in this election.  75 percent of the voters in this country are white and less than 40 percent of them say they have a favorable impression of the African American candidate.  I don't know what he can do to change their minds in the upcoming months.  

Fortunately for him, he might not have to.  Each day the electorate seems to grow younger and more diverse as McCain appears older and less relevant.  Obama may finally overcome the race obstacle, not by transcending it, but by overwhelming it.      

 

Tough Love

On Friday, we threw another birthday party for America.  She turned 232.  Not old, by imperial standards, but no longer a fresh-faced ingenue, either.  She's a fully matured woman now, still capable of turning heads but she looks her best wearing makeup and heels with the lights down low.

New York City's celebration seemed pretty sedate, at least by Big Apple standards.  Certainly there was little of the spectacle of the two great July 4th's of my lifetime -- 1976's bicentennial, with it's tall ships sailing up the Hudson as New York prepared to host its first Democratic Convention in 52 years and celebrate their economic recovery from the previous year's near-bankruptcy, and 1986, when the Statue of Liberty turned 100 and Presidents Reagan and Mitterrand partied all weekend with the help of Frank Sinatra, Johnny Cash, 30,000 vessels in New York Harbor and the largest fireworks display in American history.

No, it rained this year, fittingly.  Not that precipitation was necessary to dampen the country's patriotic fervor.  It's been a tough twenty-first century so far here in WORSP (that would be the World's Only Remaining Super-Power).  As George Bush's reign of error inches towards a close, we have less for which to be thankful with each passing day.  

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan drag on, although little notice is taken anymore.  Mention of American casualties is rare and Iraqi casualties rarer.  Pictures of our fallen soldiers are non-existent.  Half-hearted arguments fizzle here and there, like a sparkler discarded at a picnic, as to whether the surge is actually working, but they're more for the sake of appearances than anything else.  $100 fill-ups at the pump and a 5.5% unemployment rate have slowly and methodically sapped the country of the will to protest a war seen only on HBO and paid for by borrowing against our children's futures.  Even the government we installed in Iraq is sick of us.  Prime Minister al-Maliki presented us this week with a gift-wrapped demand to leave, the sooner the better, and the Bush/McCain response was, "No thanks, we're good."

General Antonio Tagube, the messenger whom Bush sent to investigate the reported atrocities at Abu Ghraib and then promptly fired when Tagube informed him there was gambling taking place in the casino, made a noisy comeback as Independence Day approached.  He hooked up with the Physicians for Human Rights on their report detailing the torture of prisoners by the American army and declared, "There is no longer any doubt as to whether the current administration has committed war crimes.  The only question is whether those who ordered torture will be held to account."  What's that you say?  War crimes?  It brought us halfway out of our Barcaloungers, where we were depressively trying to nap away the summer.  But the concept of an entire administration being guilty to some degree of war crimes was too much for us to get our heads around so we filed it under "left-wing crazy," right next to the image of Dennis Kucinich reading articles of impeachment into the record of the House of Representatives.  (The idea that Congress in its present construct would, or could, actually impeach a corrupt president is laughable.  Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, admits she "would probably advocate" impeachment -- if she were not in the House.  But, as it is, "the question of impeachment is something that would divide the country."  There's some leadership for you.)  So the Bush/Cheney train continues inexorably on down the tracks, running out the clock until they return to the private sector and cash in the chips they've been amassing for these past eight years.  And our fitful  slumber continued.

Former Deputy Associate Administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, Jason Burnett, accused Vice President Cheney's staff of editing congressional testimony on the threats of global warming.  Seems the veep wasn't happy with the conclusions drawn that climate change has human health consequences.  "I'm not interested in pointing fingers at any individual," Burnett said, but (he might as well have added), "the guy I'm thinking of has a battery in his chest and I think he lives in a bunker."  To which we yawned.  That kind of penny-ante corruption barely survives a full news cycle these days.

I know it's the 4th of July.  I know it's a time to profess love of country, greatest experiment mankind has ever seen, blah, blah, blah.  Trouble is, it's hard to perform on demand.  And I'm just not feeling it.

To borrow a time-worn analogy, if America was a woman with whom I was involved, our relationship would be on the rocks.  She's like this big, beautiful, rich and powerful woman you brought home to meet the parents a couple of decades ago.  She may have had a few skeletons rattling around the back of her closet -- genocide, slavery, sexism -- and your parents warned you to keep your eyes open, but you went ahead and took the plunge.  She was just so damned sexy and she took care of you, besides.  The toys kept rolling in and you continued trading up for better apartments.  Sure, she drank a little too much and she could be a bit on the loud side.  People whispered behind your backs that she was pushy.  But you ignored them and concentrated on her good qualities.  She could be generous to a fault when she was so inclined, she always did her best to help you get ahead and, most of all, she was never boring. 

But the relationship is troubled.  As the years pass, it becomes more and more difficult to excuse her acting out.  Finally, you wake up one morning after dragging her out of a party she had crashed after too many cocktails where she insulted the host, got in a fight with the guest of honor and refused to leave when asked.  You look at her, passed out next to you in your king-size waterbed; all puffy and bloated, her greying roots showing beneath her dye job, skin  dried and wrinkled from too many borrowed cigarettes and too much Caribbean sun.  And you realize, as you watch her sleep those last few moments before she opens her bloodshot eyes, hung over and mad at the world, that maybe you don't love her all that much anymore. 

When you try to explain the situation to friends they ask, "Why don't you leave her?"  And the truth is, maybe you should.  But, when push comes to shove, you just can't bring yourself to walk out the door.  Let's face it, you're no spring chicken yourself.  All of your friends are her friends.  They'd probably choose her and you'd be left to grow old, without the benefit of grace or company.  The apartment is nice -- could you really go back to a studio in one of the boroughs after three bedrooms and a roof-top pool in Soho?  Plus the sex is still good once in a while.  Damned good.  And she can still make your heart sing when she smiles that smile she saves for only you.  So you stay, promising yourself there are better days ahead.

That's pretty much how I feel about America these days.  When someone says, "Love it or leave it," I'm forced to admit that I probably should, but I probably won't.  Italy's a long way away and they don't play baseball.

So, I roll over, give her a kiss and say, "Happy anniversary, dear."