Note: If the above doesn’t work, then try this link: Pennsylvania GOP.

The Pennsylvania Republican Party released a new TV ad featuring Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Senator Obama’s pastor of 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago. This marks the first time Obama’s relationship with his former preacher has been the subject of any GOP ad in Pennsylvania during the general election season. A number of 527 groups have run ads featuring some of the more controversial statements by the Reverend Wright in other states including Michigan, Ohio, Indiana and Virginia. It’s not clear that these ads have had much of an effect on the race. This new ad is a 30 second spot and running across the Keystone State.

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Polls in Florida (link to US Census demographic data) continue to show a tight, competitive race that fluctuates back and forth. Earlier this week, two polls gave Senator Obama narrow leads of four and five points. Last week, a SUSA poll gave Senator McCain a two point lead, 49% to 47%. Another poll from Rasmussen Reports gave McCain a point lead, 49% to 48%. A Public Policy Polling poll out late last week gave Senator Obama a one point lead, 48% to 47% while a Mason-Dixon poll gave Senator McCain a one point edge, 46% to 45%. On Thursday, a poll from Quninnipiac pointed a narrow two point lead for Senator Obama, 47% to 45%. Today’s poll from Mason-Dixon Polling and Research poll for the Orlando Sentinel again puts the race in the Sunshine State at 47% to 45% in favour of Senator Obama. Effectively, the race in Florida seems to be a dead heat.

With 48 hours until Election Day and candidates swarming the state like mosquitoes, a new Orlando Sentinel poll suggests that the race for president in Florida remains too close to call.

The poll, by Mason-Dixon Polling & Research, shows Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain 47 percent to 45 percent, well within the poll’s 4-point margin of error. With the race essentially tied going into the last lap, Florida’s 27 electoral votes remain the biggest battleground prize for either candidate.

If Obama wins here, he is virtually assured the presidency. If McCain loses, his candidacy is all but dead. Mason Dixon Polling & Research interviewed 625 likely voters Wednesday and Thursday.

“To use a Florida analogy,” said polling director Brad Coker, “these numbers have stayed in a very narrow cone for both candidates.” McCain’s best hope, he said, may be the fact that the 7 percent of voters who remain undecided are overwhelmingly white — and could decide to vote against Obama becoming America’s first African-American president.

“I have no clue if you’ll see it,” said Coker, who noted that such last-minute voter movement has been seen in other races involving black candidates. “All I’m saying is, you could see them go for McCain. I wouldn’t be shocked.”

The numbers show a 3-point swing toward Obama from a Mason-Dixon survey released 11 days ago that had McCain up by a single point in the Sunshine State.

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A number of polls over the past weeks in Wisconsin pointed to a slight tightening of the race in the Badger State. Two polls from SUSA and Rasmussen Reports had given Senator Obama a ten point lead. But a Rasmussen Reports poll just five days ago gave Obama a seven point lead, 51% to 44%. Today’s Badger poll from the University of Wisconsin (pdf.), however, puts the race back at ten points in Obama’s favour among likely voters.

As Election 2008 entered the final two weeks, the recent Badger Poll asked Wisconsin Residents about their views on the presidential election.

• Among all adult residents of Wisconsin, Barack Obama leads John McCain 54% to 38%.

• Among likely voters (N=359) in this survey 52% favor Barack Obama, while 42% favor John McCain.

• Overall, 63% of Wisconsinites have a favorable impression of Senator Obama, while 39% have a favorable impression of Senator McCain.

• When it comes to impressions of the Vice-Presidential candidates, 45% have a favorable impression of Senator Joe Biden and 32% have a favor impression of Alaska Governor Sarah Palin.

The recent Badger Poll also asked which presidential candidate Wisconsinites thought was better able to handle eight issues. More respondents favored Barack Obama on all eight of the issues.

• Better at understanding the problems of ordinary people: 64% Obama 22% McCain.

• Better at handling the economy: 57% Obama 28% McCain.

• Better at providing leadership to the U.S.: 57% Obama 29% McCain.

• Better at dealing with corruption in D.C.: 53% Obama 28% McCain.

• Better at handling foreign relations: 52% Obama 39% McCain.

• Better at handling the situation in Iraq: 52% Obama 37% McCain.

• Better at handling Afghanistan: 51% Obama 36% McCain.

• Better at handling terrorism: 49% Obama 38% McCain.

• The largest issue that Badger State residents thought was the most important in their vote for president was the economy at 39%, with 48% of Obama supporters saying the economy is the most important issue and 29% of McCain supporters saying the economy is the most important issue.

• Only 14% of Wisconsinites are satisfied with they way things are going in the U.S. today, down from 23% in April of 2008. 81% said they are dissatisfied.

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The latest Rasmussen Reports poll for Pennsylvania (link is US Census demographic data) is fuel to rethink some of my current assumptions about the US Presidential race of 2008. The McCain campaign’s concerted efforts in the Keystone State are paying off in a big way. Over the past month, McCain has erased eleven points off Senator Obama’s once commanding lead of 15 points. In today’s poll, Obama leads 51% to 47%. The lead is just outside the margin of error. The move in internals is a slight uptick for McCain among undecideds and a drop in support among Democrats for Obama. If there is a PUMA movement left, it is in states like Florida and Pennsylvania.

In Pennsylvania, John McCain is getting closer, but Barack Obama is still attracting a majority of voters.

The latest Rasmussen Reports telephone survey of voters in the state shows Obama with 51% of the vote while McCain picks up 47%. That four-point advantage for Obama is down from a seven-point margin earlier in the week and a 13-point advantage for Obama earlier in the month.

Just 75% of Pennsylvania Democrats now support their party’s nominee, down from 86% in the previous survey. Obama is doing a bit better among unaffiliated voters while Republican support for McCain remains steady.

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I’m glad to see the well-respected Democratic Party pollster Douglas Schoen partially agree with me that this election has become a referendum on the forty year Republican Era. Tuesday seems ever more likely to bring the first Democratic landslide in 44 years and only the fourth ever in the nation’s history. For a party that dates back to 1828 and has largely been the party out of power, this is as good as it gets. If you have been reading my polling posts you may have noticed this point:

This election increasingly seems a repudiation of the Republican era, but it is not necessarily a validation of Senator Obama and his brand of politics.

Today Mr. Schoen writes in an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal.

There is a very challenging question facing America that few pundits and politicians have discussed as we approach an election that could produce a landslide of potentially historic proportions.

How will a renewed and increased Democratic majority judge the results of the election? What implications will they draw from these results?

Stated simply, if the Democrats conclude that they have a mandate to implement their agenda without real consultation with the Republicans, as Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island suggested in an interview with the New York Times last weekend, the country will be headed for trouble.

Real trouble.

This election is not a mandate for Democratic policies. Rather, it is a wholesale rejection of the policies of George W. Bush, Republicans, and to a lesser extent, John McCain. But it is not, as poll after poll has shown, an embrace of the Democratic Congress, which has approval ratings that are actually lower than that of the president.

While I am not convinced that most Americans understand the historical significance of all that has occurred since 1968, an era of unbridled deregulation and widening income inequality that has sapped the power of the country during which the Democratic Party devolved from its working class roots to become a GOP-lite tied intimately to corporatist interests and espousing an economic ideology more Friedmanist than Keynesian, the American electorate in 2008 seems to be voicing a deep and profound rejection of trickle down economics, globalization run amok and regressive tax policies that has left most Americans falling behind in global living standards and socio-economic metrics. The US ranks 38th in life expectancy in 2008. In 1964, the US ranked 10th. But let’s dig a little deeper.

On average, US life expectancy rose by three years (from 73.7 to 76.7) between 1980 and 2000, but the largest gains were made by the most affluent layers of the population, leading to a growing gap in life expectancy between the lower and higher income groups.

In a study for US Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), Dr. Gopal Singh and Professor Mohammed Siahpush measured social and economic conditions in every US county by examining 2000 census data on education, income, poverty, housing and other factors.

The report said in 1980-1982, people in the most affluent group could expect to live 2.8 years longer than those in the poorest (75.8 versus 73 years). By 1998-2000, the difference in life expectancy had increased to 4.5 years (79.2 versus 74.7), and it continues to widen.

“Life expectancy was higher for the most affluent in 1980 than for the most deprived group in 2000,” he said. “If you look at the extremes in 2000,” Dr. Singh added, “men in the most deprived counties had 10 years’ shorter life expectancy than women in the most affluent counties (71.5 versus 81.3 years).”

On almost every measure, Americans are growing apart. The chasm between rich and poor is not just wider but also deeper. In short, as Paul Krugman noted at height of the market turbulence this past month “we are a banana republic with nukes.” These results aren’t by accident. In 2008, the US is far poorer as a collective society than we were in 1964 despite our many technological comforts. The harsh reality is that the United States is a clefted nation as a result of the Friedmanistic economic policies pursued by Republican and Democrat alike since 1968 and clefted nations have a propensity to fail.

Nancy Krieger, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health, has found that trends in life expectancy have paralleled the decrease or increase in social inequality over the past 40 years. Kreiger found that the rate of premature mortality—dying before the age of 65—and infant death from 1960 to 2002, shrank between 1966 and 1980, but then widened over the next 20 years.

“The recent trend of growing disparities in health status is not inevitable,” she said. “From 1966 to 1980, socio-economic disparities declined in tandem with a decline in mortality rates.” She said the creation of Medicaid and Medicare—the two major federal programs for the poor and elderly—along with health centers, the social programs of LBJ’s “war on poverty” had contributed to a narrowing the earlier inequalities in health.

The dismantling of these programs—by both Republican and Democratic administrations—over the last four decades, and the redistribution of wealth to the top — a trickle up — that has resulted, has produced a catastrophe for a majority of Americans to the extent it has even affected life spans. This is the result of the Republican espousal of Friedmanism and Democratic acquiesence of the right’s not so gilded Gilded Age. The great deregulators were Carter, Reagan and Clinton. Failed us, they have.

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The City Club of Cleveland hosted the leading third party candidates in a Presidential debate. The debate included independent Ralph Nader, Libertarian Party candidate Bob Barr and Constitution Party candidate Chuck Baldwin. The debate runs sixty minutes.

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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. Just four more days.

Best, Worst Finance Decision of the Election
By Jeanne Cummings writing for Politico.

Barack Obama’s decision not to accept taxpayer financing for his general election campaign turned money into a central issue of the 2008 presidential race.

When all is said and done, the two champions of campaign finance reform, Obama and John McCain, will go down in history as the first two major party nominees to spend a combined $1 billion.

That figure, which doesn’t include the money shelled out by their national parties, was widely predicted at the start of the 2008 election cycle. The surprise is that it was reached with one candidate playing inside the limits imposed by the presidential financing system and the other staying outside of them.

But having money and spending it wisely are often two different .

Twenty Million Heed Obama’s Call to Vote Early
By Tom Baldwin and Tim Reid in the Times of London.

The long lines of Americans queuing for hours to vote early may be helping to pull Barack Obama all the way to the White House. But on Hallowe’en night yesterday Democrats were still warily watching polling stations for signs of tricks, as well as treats.

More than 20 million early ballots have already been cast and the larger share of these has been by registered Democrats. As Mr Obama embarked on a sweep of eight states in the final 96 hours of the election, his aides said there were real signs that hopes of a surge among first-time voters were being fulfilled.

If they needed a reminder of what can go wrong, there was Al Gore returning to Palm Beach county in Florida yesterday. This was the scene of bitter disputes over hanging chads and butterfly ballots which still rankle eight years after a 36-day recount was halted by the Supreme Court, handing George Bush the presidency. “Take it from me, every vote matters,” Mr Gore said, stepping back on the campaign trail for the first time since losing by little more than 500 votes.

One Last Thing: Obama Remains an Enigma
By Jonathan V. Last in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

The central fact of Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy is that no one – whether supporter or detractor – really knows what he’s about.

Some Democrats believe he is a progressive, others a centrist. Some believe he will favor a European-style internationalist foreign policy, others a hard-headed American exceptionalism. Republicans worry that he is a paleo-liberal on domestic matters and a naïve accommodationist in foreign affairs.

There is evidence to support all of these suppositions. Whether by accident or design, Obama’s record is thin and ambiguous.

For instance, what does Obama really think about taxation? In the course of his campaign, he has promised not to raise income taxes on families making less than $250,000. Yet he proposes lots of other tax increases: on capital gains and dividends, estates and businesses.

Obama proposes “tax cuts” for 95 percent of Americans. But much of that really comes down to tax credits for people who don’t pay federal income taxes, of whom there are quite a few.

So who is the real Obama? The sensible, centrist tax-cutter, or the progressive given to “spreading the wealth around”? Perhaps Obama’s true beliefs about taxation were revealed in a 2001 radio interview in which he spoke – approvingly, it seemed – about “economic justice” and “redistribution of wealth.”

I am relieved that I am not the only one who thinks Senator Obama is an engima. (more…)

The latest rage on the PUMA blogs is to print the confession of an Obama campaign worker. The one below is well written and better than the others that are circulating (the last one I read also by a female ex-Clinton campaign worker now working for Obama had over 20 spelling and grammatical mistakes and yet the woman was a marketing professional who didn’t know the difference between conscious and conscience or moral and morale). This one, at least, is well-written but it is also like the others fictional aiming to discredit the Obama campaign and continue to paint Obama as a nefarious character out to destroy the American way of life and usurp government. He’s a politician with attributes and flaws. He’s neither the messiah that some of his supporters believe nor the devil incarnate as some of his detractors argue. The confession and then some thoughts.

I am a female grad student in my 20’s, and a registered Democrat. During the primaries, I was a campaign worker for the Clinton candidacy. I believed in her and still do, staying all the way to the bitter end. And believe me, it was bitter. The snippets you’ve heard from various media outlets only grazed the surface. There was no love between the Clinton and Obama campaigns, and these feelings extended all the way to the top. Hillary was no dope though, and knew that any endorsement of Obama must appear to be a full-fledged one. She did this out of political survival.

As a part of his overall effort to extend an olive branch to the Clinton camp and her supporters, Obama took on a few Hillary staff members into his campaign. I was one such worker. Though I was still bitterly loyal to Hillary, I still held out hope that he would choose her as VP. In fact, there was a consensus among us transplants that in the end, he HAD to choose her. It was the only logical choice. I also was committed to the Democratic cause and without much of a second thought, transferred my allegiance to Senator Obama.

I’m going to let you in on a few secrets here, and this is not because I enjoy the gossip or the attention directed my way. I’m doing this because I doubt much of you know the true weaknesses of Obama.

Another reason for my doing this is that I have lost faith in this campaign, and feel that this choice has been forced on many people in this country.

Put simply, you are being manipulated. That was and is our job – to manipulate you (the electorate) and the media (we already had them months ago). Our goal is to create chaos with the other side, not hope.

I’ve come to the realization (as the campaign already has) that if this comes to the issues, Barack Obama doesn’t have a chance. His only chance is to foster disorganization, chaos, despair, and a sense of inevitability among the Republicans.

It has worked up until now. Joe the Plumber has put the focus on the issues again, and this scares us more than anything. Being in a position to know these things, I will rate what the Obama campaign already knows are their weak links from the most important on down.

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