McCain is up 4 percentage points in some polls. After their convention, the Republicans are on a Minnesota high (their version of John Denver’s “Rocky Mountain High“):
I’ve seen it rainin’ fire in the sky
Friends around the campfire and everybody’s hiiiiiiiiiiiggghhhh.
Republicans are so high that, if they didn’t have a president in the White House, the DEA would arrest all of them.
And you know they’ve been smokin’ somethin’ because, despite the Palin choice for VP, their main choice is still the same old liberal Republican John McCain: amnesty for illegal aliens with the McCain-Kennedy plan, opposed Bush’s tax cuts but then flip-flopped, imposed the McCain-Feingold-Stalin Act shredding of the First Amendment, pushes global warming, joined the Gang of 14 that promotes liberal judicial appointments, etc.
But let’s float back down to reality for a moment.
Obama has messed up in recent weeks. His partisans have stupidly taken after Palin’s religion, her Hockey Mom demeanor, her five kids, and even her Down’s Syndrome baby. Democrats can be really dumb, too.
But Obama’s attacks are just beginning. And in the end, it’s the presidential nominee, not the VP, whom people vote for. We don’t even know what role Palin actually would have in a McCain White House. For sure she won’t be a Cheney, running the show behind the scenes. But will she be a Gore, getting involved in a lot of things, or a Dan Quayle, shunted off to supervise spelling bees?
So let’s get down to basics, shall we? Obama has to win only the same electoral states as Kerry did in 2004, plus Ohio — while not losing any states Kerry won.
Is Obama going to win Ohio? Almost certainly. He’s concentrating forces there. Here’s a report:
In Ohio, the state reported last month it had a 7.2 percent unemployment rate in July. That was the highest rate since it was 7 percent in January 1993. The highest one-month rate since 1970 was 13.8 percent in January 1983.
For all of America:
Unemployment rate jumps to 5-year high
Grim data show U.S. has been hemorrhaging jobs all summer
By Jeannine Aversa
Associated Press
Published on Saturday, Sep 06, 2008
WASHINGTON: The nation’s unemployment rate zoomed to a five-year high of 6.1 percent in August as employers slashed 84,000 jobs.
The Labor Department’s report released Friday showed the increasing toll that the housing, credit and financial crises are taking on the economy.
With the employment situation deteriorating, there’s growing worry that consumers will recoil with less spending, hurting the economy later this year or early next year.
The jobless rate jumped to 6.1 percent in August, from 5.7 percent in July. Employers cut payrolls for the eighth month in a row. Also, job losses in June and July turned out to be much deeper than the preliminary figures that were released. (The job figures for August will be subject to revision in upcoming months as well.)
The economy lost 100,000 jobs in June and another 60,000 in July, according to the revised figures. Previously, the government reported job losses at 51,000 in each of those
months.So far this year, job losses have totaled 605,000.
The latest snapshot was worse than economists were forecasting. They were predicting payrolls would drop by around 75,000 in August and the jobless rate would tick up a notch, to 5.8 percent.
The autumn of our discontent
It’s only going to get worse by November.
And let’s remember that President Clinton rigged the federal unemployment calculations back in the early 1990s to boost his own re-election. Economist John Williams recently explained:
During the Clinton administration, discouraged workers were redefined. If you were a discouraged worker for more than one year, you were no longer a candidate in any category whatsoever. That had the effect of sharply changing the measure. That reduced the count from roughly 5 million to about 300,000. The unemployment rate, as most people count unemployment, is up around 13%.
Get that, America? The real unemployment rate is “up around 13%,” close to the 15% level that defines a depression.
It’s the economy, stupid
One of my pet peeves is Bill Clinton’s 1992 internal campaign slogan, which they posted in their campaign HQ: “It’s the economy, stupid.” This is shown in the interesting documentary on that campaign, “The War Room.” You can bet both campaigns study the documentary the way football players review films of opposing teams.
But the slogan worked for Clinton. Now that Obama is down in the polls, his campaign will cut out the nonsense, forget about Palin and anything else, and just hit the economic performance.
You know McCain’s camp fears just that strategy because he’s campaigning as the candidate of “change.” Even though Republicans have controlled the White House for 8 years and controlled Congress for 5 of the past 8 years!
And McCain himself is an old horse who’s been in Congress for more than 2 decades.
Republicans also are trying to co-opt the issue of high energy prices by proposing more drilling. Good idea, but that’s only a fraction of the solution. The real solution, which McCain won’t even touch — and might not even know about — is to return to the gold standard. It’s monetary inflation, not a lack of drilling, that has caused most of this problem. And why do we have inflation? Because, after 9/11, Bush and Fed Chairman Greenspan panicked and inflated the currency to pay for Bush’s wars — wars McCain still supports.
But at some point the whole war-inflation-deficits-debt house of cards falls apart. That’s happening now.
So the McCain “change” strategy just isn’t going to work as Obama hammers away at the economy, the high energy prices, the armies of the unemployed.
Obama’s “solutions” would make things worse
Obama’s economic program, if anything, is even worse than McCain’s: higher taxes, more regulations, even worse foolishness on global warming, no return to the gold standard, not reducing war but switching the emphasis to Afghanistan, and so on.
But if you’re standing in an unempoloyment line in Ohio, and your kids are getting hungry and won’t get any toys for Christmas, you don’t care about the details. You want change.
The Bolsheviks (the progenitors of McCain’s Neoconservative advisers, by the way) took over Russia in 1917 by promising “bread and land.” Instead, Russians got 74 years of war, socialism, starvation, mass murder, gulags, and the near-death or Russia and the Russian people.
So Obama sure isn’t the answer.
But after 8 years of BushMcCainRepublican endless wars, BushMcCainRepublican inflation, BushMcCainRepublican unemployment, and BushMcCainRepublican malaise, people are going to want a change not just of men, but of parties.
Finally, these last weeks McCain’s 72-year age is going to start showing. They must have rested him well and pumped him full of Vitameatavegamin before his Thursday acceptance speech. But he can’t do that every day or he’ll end up like Lucy:
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