Here are eight articles from both the US and international media about the US Presidential race. Highlights of each article provided with a link to the full article.
Obama-McCain Gap Narrows
From Gallup.
The latest Gallup Poll Daily tracking report finds registered voters preferring Barack Obama (50%) to John McCain (43%) when asked who they would vote for if the presidential election were held today (October 12).
The good news for Senator McCain is that he has shaved four points off Senator Obama’s lead since Wednesday. The bad news is that he still trails by seven points. Rasmussen Reports tomorrow (Monday) will show a five point differential in favour of Obama. This pattern has been repeating itself for some time. Everytime Obama makes a strong move, there is a pull back. Still the gap over time has widen. It’s clear that many remain uncomfortable with Obama even if they at this time intend to vote for him. I expect the race to tighten but as of now the polls in the battleground states continue to favour Obama. My thesis remains intact but we will have at least five major battleground state polls out on Monday.
Palin’s Folksy Charm a Hit in Democratic Region
By Joe Hallett in the Columbus Dispatch.
Speaking in front of a barn surrounded by straw bales near the airport in Belmont County, Palin was cheered wildly by a crowd of 12,000 on a lovely autumn evening in a county that has supported Democratic nominees in the last four presidential elections.
Although Ohio’s eastern and southeastern Ohio River counties traditionally swing Democratic, DeWine said Palin’s social conservatism plays well with the area’s voters, including conservative Democrats.
“These are people who on virtually every issue agree with John McCain and Sarah Palin – from guns to abortion to mining,” DeWine said. “She connects with people.”
That was evident in interviews with supporters at the rally; many felt a kinship with the folksy Palin.
“She’s more a person like me,” said John Yager, 48, a planner-estimator from St. Clairsville. “She’s not a politician, she’s not a lawyer. She’s a person who worked her way up the chain, like I have.”
Virginia Rapp, 67, drove from Williamstown, W.Va., to see Palin because “she believes what I believe in – country first. I think she’s a down-to-earth person, and she’s all for this country.”
Belmont County is part of Ohio’s 29-county Appalachian region up for grabs in the election 22 days away. Obama’s running mate, Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, will make a two-day bus tour through the region beginning Monday, and Obama visited last week.
Palin played up her small-town upbringing and political rise from mayor of Wasilla to Alaska governor. She compared Wasilla to St. Clairsville, saying, “I don’t care what anybody else says, I love small-town USA. You guys just get it.”
Democrats Out-Register Republicans in Swing States
By Alex Spillius in the UK Daily Telegraph.
A boom in voter registration across America has raised the possibility of a landslide victory for Senator Barack Obama, with an overwhelming majority of the nine million new voters believed to favour the Democratic candidate.
Bill Clinton Stumps in Virginia: ‘Time to do the right thing’
By Jonathan Martin for Politico.
“’He’s going to win, I don’t have to give a lick,’” Clinton said at a floodlit rally in a courtyard on the campus of Virginia Commonwealth University, aping the voice of a Democratic activist. “He probably will win if you don’t give a lick, but if you don’t give a lick we won’t win the … congressional seats, we won’t win the Senate seats, we won’t win the governorships, we won’t have the chance to show America what will actually happen if he can implement his ideas.”
Clinton has sought to embrace more of a statesman role since Hillary Clinton lost the Democratic nomination, offering praise for both Obama and McCain—and often more analysis than passion about the campaign.
But with Election Day approaching, Clinton offered the student-heavy crowd a dose of partisanship and amped up his energy.
McCain Makes Risky Play for Pennsylvania
By Kenneth P. Vogel and Amie Parnes writing for Politico.
Pennsylvania hasn’t voted Republican for president since 1988. Democrats have increased their registration numbers here by more than a half-million over the past year, and Barack Obama has a double-digit lead in the polls.
Yet John McCain’s campaign continues to signal that it intends to contest the state and its 21 electoral votes to the end. It is a high-risk, high-return endeavor: Pennsylvania represents a costly gambit, one that siphons resources from must-win states such as Ohio and Florida, but a win here would enable McCain to lose a few other states that George W. Bush carried and still capture the White House.
So with 23 days until Election Day, the state finds itself at the epicenter of the presidential campaign, with both sides spending precious time and money trying to energize their respective bases and drive up their opponents’ negatives.
Pennsylvania is not on my list of battleground states at the moment as Obama has double digit leads in the last two polls. Still, the McCain camp must see something they like in their own internal polling. The other possibility is that perhaps they have nothing left to lose since it’s likely that Obama will pick up two maybe three states in the South and West that Bush carried in 2004 and winning Pennsylvania would offset that. But again, two polls have Obama leading by as many as 13 points. That seems like quite a large margin to tackle at first glance but I suspect given a number of articles that I have referenced the past week that Obama’s support in parts of Pennsylvania is tepid at best. The other side of the coin is that I really haven’t seen from McCain a reason why people in this part of the country should vote for him. McCain is certainly articulating why people shouldn’t vote for Obama but what I think he is missing (so are the mostly delusional anti-Obama blogs) is that the mood of the country is such that people need reasons to vote for someone, not just against the other candidate. Obama is so far doing a better job of this. Just look at his campaign ads and compare them to McCain ads.
Barack’s Cool Pop
By John Heilemann in New York Magazine.
In presidential politics, nothing tells you more about a candidate’s strategy—and his campaign’s perception of his standing in the race—than his schedule. So it spoke volumes when, on the morning after the second debate between John McCain and Barack Obama, the Democratic nominee flew straight from Nashville to a rally in Indianapolis. As Senator Evan Bayh reminded the 21,000 Obamaphiles assembled on a drizzly weekday at the state fairgrounds, no Democrat has carried Indiana since 1964. George W. Bush trounced John Kerry there by a whopping 21 points. And yet most recent statewide polls show Obama running neck and neck with McCain. The Republican National Committee is pumping cash into Hoosier country to stave off an upset.
Obama took the stage and began his speech soberly, declaring that we’re now in the midst of a “full-blown global financial crisis.” But there was no containing the confidence clearly brimming within the hopemonger. Leaning in to the podium, he expanded on riffs he’d deployed the night before against McCain. Then he snapped off a couplet that you’ll likely soon be hearing ad nauseam: “Back in 1980, Ronald Reagan asked the electorate whether you were better off than you were four years ago. At the pace things are going right now, you’re going to have to ask whether you’re better off than you were four weeks ago!”
The implosion of the financial system has been to Obama’s incalculable political benefit—that much is beyond dispute. With an astonishing 59 percent of Americans (according to a poll last week by CNN/Opinion Research) now believing that a full-on depression is either very or somewhat likely, the election has shifted on its axis to an all-economy, all-the-time affair. This in itself would favor any Democrat with a pulse, let alone one running against McCain, whose performance during the crisis has redefined the term abysmal. Creepy as it sounds, you could argue that for Obama, the multi-market meltdown was the luckiest break imaginable.
I have said it before and I’ll say it again it is the deepest of ironies that Obama began to pull ahead when Lehman Brothers, a top ten Obama donor, failed. And it is certainly true that Obama is one very lucky fellow.
Interview of Governor Palin in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review
By Salena Zito in the Pittsburgh Tribune Review.
About small businesses:
Palin: My husband and I … owned a business … and struggled to figure out how are were going to offer (employees) health care and make payrolls, some months, of course, being such a struggle. And then … my sister and her husband just opened up a service station up there in Alaska also. And I think of my sister, Heather, and her husband, Kurt, and I think now how will increasing taxes on a small business like theirs help them? It will not help them. It will prohibit Kurt from hiring more employees and then those people who cannot get that job, they will become more and more reliant unfortunately on kind of a bureaucratic system that sometimes in a way penalizes hard work and productivity. So it’s win-win if business taxes are reduced like I did in the city of Wasilla where I was mayor. I eliminated small business inventory taxes, wanting again for small businesses to be able to grow and prosper and thrive.
‘The Great Schlep’
By Tom Baldwin in the Times of London.
Jonathan Packman has spent the past few days enjoying poolside views of the Atlantic at his elderly Jewish grandparents’ condominium, eating quantities of their Mandel Bread – while trying to ensure that “pop pop” and “mom mom” vote for Barack Obama.
“I think my grandmother is moving towards Obama,” he says. “My grandfather is still undecided. He is old-fashioned and is having a hard time getting his mind wrapped around voting for a black man.”
Mr Packman has travelled from the ultra-liberal city of Berkeley, California, hoping that he can use his influence as a grandson to flip Florida – and the White House – back into Democratic hands.
It is called “The Great Schlep”, an effort organised by the pro-Obama Jewish Council for Education and Research, which should lead to hundreds of grandchildren descending on the Fort Lauderdale area for the Columbus Day weekend to combine an annual family visit with some ruthless political activism.