I posted this last week about the polls and told I was full of sh#t.

"Expect McCain to pull ahead in the polls next week.
He will get a Convention bump and America has fallen for the Palin regular folks, hockey mom bullshit (Ramussen has her as the only candidate with over 50% approval, 57%!!)
It doesn't matter how much we think this is a ton of crap, it's working on voters. We will have to acknowledge it, and fight it. Not just expect everyone to see the truth we know."

Most responded that I was "chicken little" and should stop worrying.

So now that McSame is pulling ahead in the polls, do we acknowledge the tough fight we have in front of us, or do you all want to keep waiting for the public to see what we see in Mac and Pal. They're not.
We have to face what we are up against. I remember being told the same thing in 04. The people would see how much better Kerry was than the lying, doofus Bush. Well...

It sucks bigtime. I only wished you were full of shit because I could not deal with the fact that we are a nation of desperately stupid morans. Congratulations. You win.

That's why we're taking off the gloves. Or maybe putting gloves on -- iron fisted ones.

How dare you tell the truth.

The Great Echo Chamber will not allow this behavior.

Assimilate or be vaporized.

No big tent around here.

Thank heavens this place is not an accurate representation of the Democrat Party.

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

And no thanks, by the way.

Okeedokee Dingy?

Okeedokee?

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Sounds to me like you've been watching too much Faux.

strange.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=132x7053820

Polls may be influenced and slanted by their sampling methods and their sampling size. We have seen polls in the same week that vary greatly. There is far too much obsession here on every poll that comes out and trying to read some deep, dark meaning into them.

If polls are nothing and show Obama down 20 in Georgia, why did he pull out of the state. Do you know something he doesn't?

We vote starting next week and BO going to Big Dog now is way too little way too late. Have you looked at the undecideds in your polls?

I think the Obama campaign pays much more attention to state polls than national polls since the election is a 50 state election. We have seen weeks where the national polls have shown Obama ahead, close, or even tied with McCain. What trend might one read from those kind of polls?

I would say it iv close to over. The top Dems and big money people have figured out that they will be lucky to hold Congress thanks to BO being a weak candidate (down 20 points in Georgia and pulled out so it must be a 49 state strategy now) and Pelosi and Reid being useless, having played prevent defense.

With everything that is wrong with chimpy and the repugs the dems are once again looking at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Stevenson, Kerry, Obama, aloofness just doesn't get elected. Feel your pain Kennedy, Carter, Clinton, get elected. Apparently we will never learn.

I heard Michelle Obama saying one the the most important things is getting paid family leave? Really, who has a job to take leave from?

And I won't even start on the democratic leadership.

I know, I am full of sh*t, right? Just look at your undecideds in the polls and see how much there is too move.

We don't need any fatalists on here.

Fourth quarter is no time to be crying.

Are YOU phone banking, block walking, registering people to vote?.?.?

Apparently YOU haven't been listening to Obama's speeches. He talks to voters about how bad it is under the current situation. Spare me your doom and gloom.

I don't rely on polls that only do sample polling of a few hundred people.

maybe whenever he decides to pull his thumb out he can suck on it.

That poll was a) based on a small sample that didn't include Barr, a native of Georgia, and b) run by one of Gingrich's flying monkeys. It's bullshit. A Republican psy-op.

I live here and I see the Obama bumper stickers and yard signs every day -- in formerly solid Republican areas. McCain signs are scarcer than a hen's teeth. Obama has a lot of enthusiastic support here. If he doesn't win Georgia, it'll be because someone hacked those Tinker toy voting machines.

I'd say it's a little soon to call it over. In fact, a lot too soon. The fight has only just begun. Obama has a good chance to slip in *under* the radar, which is how he seems to operate.

McCain got a temporary bump due to the Palin effect. No more, no less. And he got the bump too soon -- he's peaking too soon and now is under the spotlight for the next 6+ weeks. He won't be able to withstand the glare.

Personally, I'm almost glad there's a temporary push on their side. Here's why:

1. It's forced the attention on them -- the election is no longer a "referendum on Obama." It's now a choice between Obama and McCain. It's put McCain/Palin in the limelight, with their many, many, many warts. For example, Palin threatening war with Russia -- the fundies may love that, but the rethugs at the top of the heap are clever enough to recognize that all the $$ in the world won't buy them a safe haven in an all out nuke war. The rethugs may not give a fuck about health care, education, or the middle and poor classes, but they do realize that McCain/Palin ignorance and stupidity on the economy, foreign policy and national defense will impact them too.

2. It's deepened the resolve of dems. It's time to put the pedal to the metal.

3. People will be less likely to take an Obama/Biden win for granted, and more likely to show up to vote.

Besides, I don't trust the national polls. It's too easy to skew the results by how you conduct the poll. Many, many young people are totally wireless, so not counted. And Obama got a huge boost in donations the day after Palin's acceptance speech. And the single large day of *new* contributors the day after the rethug convention ended.

And like it or not, popular vote doesn't win elections, electoral does. Obama's strategy reflects that reality, and the polls show him with a decent and growing electoral lead.

we can win this

Other than homegrown Jimmy Carter, no democrat has pulled more than 46% of the vote in Georgia since before the Civil Rights Act. While it certainly would have been nice to compete there, pulling out of Georgia is hardly a sign of impending doom.

Yep.

:hi:

Considering polls are only a very small sample of the voting public.

If you are truly concerned do whatever you can for the campaign. Register people to vote, block walk, or phone bank. Help get the message out.

And if Ohio hadn't corrupted the voting process in 04 Kerry would have WON.

flunked statistics did you?

The only thing you need to know about polls is the Wilder - Bradley effect.

It's like we are re-living 2004, and many on DU are just going along for the ride without even wanting the rest of us to be pissed off!

Obama blew it early on by taking a beating without getting out in front of McCain (and then Palin) and hitting them first.

Obama is playing defense now.

He would have looked tough if he had attacked McCain when he was up in the polls.

Instead, he waited until he was down in the polls and attacked - allowing the image to be that he has to attack because he is losing.

So, his attacks end up looking a bit desperate and defensive instead of offensive.

Obama's campaign has looked a lot like Kerry so far. Let's hope the ending is different.

Most voters are going to vote with their guts, not their brains. And there's still a hell of a lot of people who see McFailin' as much more comfortable, much more relevant, than that "uppity" Black man who knows too much for his own good.

ISSUES don't matter. Not the economy, not the war, not global warming, unless and until they can be put into emotional contexts.

Think of LBJ's "daisy" ad. IT RAN ONE TIME. ONCE. And it's resonating today over 40 years later. THAT'S HOW POWERFUL AN APPEAL TO THE EMOTIONS IS.

Bill Clinton won because he was appealing. He came across as more likeable, more down to earth, more real. So did the current asswipe. So does McCaint and so does Pain.

The Dems haven't, despite all their failures, learned their lesson. They had a better candidate in 2000 and they ran a good campaign, but they didn't appeal enough to the emotion of the swing voters. They left the campaign vulnerable to vote stealing and suppression and all manner of filthy dirty tricks that ended up stealing the election. And when Gore took the moral high ground and wouldn't fight, he showed exactly how vulnerable the Dems are and how UNWILLING they are to win.

The pukes are more than willing to do WHATEVER IS NECESSARY to win. They don't care about the moral high ground because the only high ground that's moral to them is winning. That is their definition of morality. The end justifies the means.

Kerry wimped out and goddess damn him but he made me sick. Some war hero! Couldn't even stand up to a wussy little awol guardsman and his sycophantic surrogates! Kept his nose and his hands clean, ran an honest campaign on the issues, and left us with the horrible mess. Went back to his safe senate seat and his billionaire wife and left us to ROT. Fuck him and the horse he rode in on.

Now we've got Obama. Oh, man, he's a great candidate. He's sharp and young and idealistic and he motivates the young voters and he knows the issues -- and he's gonna be brought down by a fucking broodmare with glasses who doesn't know shit about shinola. Because the Dems sit in their elitist ivory towers and preach ISSUES when what's really going to swing voters is EMOTIONS. Yeah, god and guns and gays and abortion and the insidious fear that too many white folks still have of black folks.

I live in Pinal County, Arizona, which is right next to Maricopa County, home of the world's toughest sheriff Joe Arpaio. He's also a poster child for all the racists in this country. Joe wouldn't have a snowball's chance in Tent City in July if it weren't for the overwhelming power of racism in John McCain's "home" state. I've got friends who are professed liberals, who are solidly pro-Obama, who abhor Palin, and they STILL support Joe Arpaio. Of course, so do all the racist assholes. But even liberals can be tainted with racism, and if some of us have it, what do you think the run-of-the-mill, under-informed swing voter is thinking?

Obama should have come right out and jumped all over Palin and McCain from the instant her smarmy little bespectacled face was trotted out. There should NEVER have been a "hands off the kids" warning. In order to WIN when the other side is fighting dirty, you gotta get down in the mud. Wash yourself off afterwards, but don't hesitate to get dirty. Can't stand the heat, Barack? Then get outta the fucking kitchen.

Palin's a piece of work. On the issues, she's a wacko and a stupid wacko. She's uninformed, unqualified, religiously as fundamentalist and dangerous as the 19 9/11 hijackers. She's Osama bin Palin. But the minute Biden and Obama refrained from savaging her, they admitted they SHARE the sexist and racist ideals of their opponents. That women -- especially mothers of special needs children -- are sancrosanct, that they can do and say WHATEVER THEY WANT and not be called to account for it. Furthermore, they refused to acknowledge that Palin was put out there not as a "gender card" candidate but as a "race card" candidate. She's the very symbol of white christian womanhood, and she's out there up against the evil, sneering, lusty and lustful and sexy and dangerous black man.

Someone posted yesterday about Emmett Till, the Chicago teen-ager who was tortured and murdered for the crime of daring to smile at or look at or even speak to a white woman in the segregated south. We haven't progressed much in our attitudes since then. And because of it, I'm not sure all the newly registered voters and the enthusiasm Obama has generated are going to be enough to overcome the entrenched christian racism in this country.

Polls schmolls. The only one that counts is the one that gets tabulated in November. This election should be a no brainer. Obama should win in a fucking landslide. That the race is even remotely close isn't a result of skewed polls or media attention or convention bounces. It's because the Dems are incapable of addressing the EMOTIONAL needs of the people they need to vote for them. Not the liberals and progressives and the idealists, because we're gonna vote with our heads instead of our guts. But we ain't enough to put him over the top.

Call me names. Call me a fatalist, a defeatist, a hand-wringing Clinton PUMA or whatever the fuck you want. You can even call me wrong. But I don't think I'm wrong. And I think that until the Dems and the Obama campaign realize that they ain't gonna win if they ain't willin' to get down in the dirt with McCaint and his cute little white girl, you're gonna continue to see Obama slide in the polls lose support and end up giving McCaint a concession phone call very early on a November Tuesday evening.

It's not gonna work to just preach issues. You gotta reach into the gut.

I don't see it happenin'.


Tansy Gold

Obama is a great candidate and he would make a great president.

But so far his campaign hasn't proven that they are willing to do what's needed to win. I'm not sure if this is Obama's strategy or if he was getting bad advice, but in the end the campaign is his responsibility. He should have started hitting McCain and Palin early on when the media was more focused on him. Democrats are always afraid to "go negative" but Republicans have no such fear. That's why we've got Bush in the white house - twice.

Let's hope Obama's campaign is changing course in time to win this election.

also think their ad campaign is smarter

the 'rosie the riveter' ad, wiht palin as rosie was pure brilliance

surely resonated deeply with the male and female manufacturing working class in ohio, michigan and indiana.....states we need....

where's our equivalent?

here in so cal we don't see the ads, but judging from what i read on blogs, they're a bit tepid at best

O should have been hitting hard from the start, from his early position of strength...

this is all going according to the same old script....

Karl Rove is a better political tactician than anyone in the democratic party.

Obama is now the underdog. Let's not complain or wring our hands.

Let's find a way to get Obama to directly address the needs of voters in OH, NV, MI, VA, CO & NM.
Right now that's all that matters.

:hi:

RL

on edit: oh, looks like it's dead already.

:hi:

RL

:hi:

Rove has been very effective. But I don't think he's kept up with where America is right now. Who could? We're an amazingly diverse country that is constantly shifting. This election is facing, for the first time, a demographic that is more unmarried than married, a first. We now have more Hispanic voters. African-American voters are energized and registering in record numbers. Younger voters, always hard to read, could be the deciding margin. Cell phone users, with no land lines, (like my family) do not get polled.
And David Axlerod and staff have taken a long-shot candidate and propelled him (well, let's give Obama credit for being an excellent candidate -- intelligent, honest, ready to do the work necessary, humane) and beaten the Clintons. The Clintons, The consummate political animals of our time.
"The same old script" does not apply.

were supposed to carry Kerry, too...

more since 2004, wouldn't you?

Why not wait until the end of September, early October before you start I told you so threads? I don't know how many times it needs to be said polls are crap whether they show us up or down. Some polls have slants or flawed methology. We can't panic with every bad poll or get complacent with every good poll. The important thing is focusing on getting the people we know who are right for the job into the whitehouse. How about posting what you are doing in that regard to inspire other people to do the same? It is not being in lockstep or not caring but realizing there is a bigger picture and quite frankly you seem to be missing it. Keeping people motivated and with their eyes focused on what needs to be done is what is going to win this election not focusing on polls.

or recognition. Funny thing though, when they are wrong you never hear about that.

like all the posters who said the Palin pick would be a disaster for McCain and he would be down by 10 points after the Convention.
I've seen a lot of post admitting they got that wrong...NOT!

Or have you never been wrong?

I hoped I could come back and say I shouldn't have worried about Palin and the polls. I get no joy in being right. I wasn't trying to prove anything. I was reacting to the complacency I saw here about the fight ahead.
I would have liked nothing more than to wrong, and would have loved to post so.

God you fools make me want to :puke:

Fool. The OP is simply pointing out the FOLLY of overconfidence. Better prepare for the worst and hope for the best. It sounds like you advocate ignoring potential pitfalls.

i posted here in '04

anyone who stated K should have been doing things differently, while there was still time, got shot down

same ol' same ol'

But okay if it makes you feel better you are right he is ahead in some polls, if only by a point or two.

Call into key states. Here is info. There is a tutorial.

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/phonebankingland

Here are the Frequently Asked Questions:

http://my.barackobama.com/page/content/callquestions



* I'll update this later -- please PM with any questions

...if she's the draw, I would suggest that he do exactly that -- and that he make it clear the turn out at campaign stops has shown that, without Palin, McCain doesn't draw much of anybody. Drive home that Palin is, indeed, who people would be voting for if they vote for that ticket -- and that he, Obama, is determined not to let her become president because she's not ready, not qualified, and not gonna keep anyone safe (and she could be president if her 72-year-old running mate matches up with longevity and illness studies). In fact, I'd like to see Obama debate her, not McCain. Make it all about the contrast between a President Obama and a President Palin. I'd also trot out all kinds of reference to Perot and all the attention he got because he was a media sensation, the toy of the moment, and look what a mistake that choice would have been.

See? This is why I never get to work on a campaign.

you tie it right back to McCain and how her lies, inexperience and ineptitude are a direct reflection upon him because he picked her.

their strong points, not their weak ones

but they should be directed at Mccain, not palin

Palin is Rosanne to you. You forget Roseanne was in the top 10 shows 7 out of 9 years it was on.

And, Palin is now say8ing BO regrets not picking Hilary.

All the while the dems play prevent defense and the clock is running out.

In Georgia we vote beginning Monday through November. The election is now even though some pinhead said its not until November. I know many states have early voting.

Shoot the messenger all you want but read Jim Wooten today, read Freidman today. Ignore then at your peril.

It is also a little lame to say polls are no good when you disagree with them. Fox clearly sucks not not nece4ssarily the rest.

As Friedman points out, BO won lots of little southern states to get the nomination, states he has no chance of carrying in the South, and he never won any big states that matter against Hilary. Now it is showing up.

He isn't connecting. Nobody gives a damn about the price of arugula.

while McLiar is trending down.

The polls next week are going to be much more in our favor, especially considering the "Charrrliieeee" disaster and the blatant untruths being uncovered by the MSM regarding camp McLiar.

He had a spurt last week and he is stabilizing and declining now.

Of course it will be a fight. What the fuck did you think it would be?

<http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-romm/can-obama-win... >

"There is a simple fact about elections that has eluded Democrats in every presidential campaign they have lost in the last 40 years: that as a candidate, you have to focus first and foremost not on a litany of "issues" but on four stories:

the story you tell about yourself, the story your opponent is telling about himself, the story your opponent is telling about you, and the story you are telling about your opponent. Candidates who offer compelling stories in all four quadrants of this "message grid" win, and those who leave any of them to chance generally lose."

"Can Obama Win With Half a Messaging Strategy and Half a Ticket?
stumble digg reddit del.ico.us news trust mixx.com Posted September 11, 2008 | 02:02 PM (EST)


------------------------------------------------------------------------------

No strategic counterpunch and a self-emasculating VP makes Obama's job twice as hard. If his team understood messaging, he'd be doing much better against "Me-too" McCain, the make-believe maverick.

Winning presidential campaigns have four strategic messages and two messengers. Obama's glass is half empty. Let's start with "Political Strategy 101" -- well, it should be "101" but for Democrats starting with Al Gore, it apparently has been a graduate level elective that they skipped. As psychologist and Political Brain author Drew Westen explained in Huffington Post last month:


There is a simple fact about elections that has eluded Democrats in every presidential campaign they have lost in the last 40 years: that as a candidate, you have to focus first and foremost not on a litany of "issues" but on four stories: the story you tell about yourself, the story your opponent is telling about himself, the story your opponent is telling about you, and the story you are telling about your opponent. Candidates who offer compelling stories in all four quadrants of this "message grid" win, and those who leave any of them to chance generally lose.

I'd actually put it a little differently. You need a story about yourself and a story about your opponent. And you need a counterpunch to your opponent's stories about himself and about you. Ideally, the stories can be boiled down to a catchy slogan ("it's the economy, stupid") or one or two words "compassionate conservative") that make use of the memorable figures of speech from the 25-century-old art of persuasion (aka rhetoric). Same for the counterpunch ("He was for it before he was against it.").


The word "story" here is roughly equivalent to two other popular terms -- "narrative" or "frame." It is also equivalent to rhetoric's "extended metaphor," which I argue is the most important figure of speech in my not-yet-bestselling unpublished manuscript, Politics, Religion, and the English Language.

Good candidates will pound away with a strong positive extended metaphor of why you should vote for them and with an equally strong negative extended metaphor of why you should not vote for their opponents. Winning two-term candidates, like President George W. Bush with the help of Karl Rove, will have a counter-punch to their opponent's positive and negative extended metaphors. The counterpunches always use the same figure of speech -- dramatic irony, wherein someone's words unintentionally mean something quite different from (and often opposite to) what they intended.

The goal is to find a powerful dramatic irony in their opponents' words or deeds that blow up the opposition's own extended metaphor. That always makes a great story, since it is satisfying sport for people to be hoist with their own petard or for people to be uncovered as a hypocrite.

Think Michael Dukakis in an army tank, or President Bush on the aircraft carrier with the "Mission Accomplished" banner in the background, or the Swift Boat ads run against John Kerry. Dramatic irony is the key to understanding both popular culture and politics -- but that is another post."




"What Karl Rove and his disciples now running the McCain campaign figured out is that since the media doesn't really police the truth in a meaningful fashion, you can pretty much take whatever your opponent says out of context and turn that into a defining dramatic irony. Or just make stuff up entirely. The Rovian dramatic irony is almost always linked to the same extended metaphor -- the Democrat is an out of touch, intellectual elitist who is "not one of us." After seeing so many many Democratic candidates fall into this trap so easily, it is a very easy sell to the public and media, as the Rovians are proving once again. Rove's candidates, on the other hand, are always a plain spoken man (or woman) of the people.

The other point of having the four stories or frames or extended metaphors is that it makes responding to attacks very easy. If you've been rebranding McCain as the make-believe maverick then whenever he launches a phony attack, you can just point out this is more proof he is the make-believe maverick pushing the old politics, whereas you remain the one-and-only candidate of real change

Back to the four stories Obama needs.

1. He has (most of) the story about himself: "Change" or "Change we can believe in" -- although, as McCain has shown, it is not really a full frame or extended metaphor because it doesn't really connect Obama's background and values with his policies, as an ideal story would do. Thus it can be twisted into "the wrong kind of change."

2. Obama's best story is about McCain: McCain=Bush, McCain is more of the same. None of these is rhetorically memorable, though at least there are a lot of visuals and facts linking McCain and Bush. This story is, of course, mostly policy-oriented and not a character attack -- and it is certainly true that Obama is winning the policy war but losing the character war.

3. Obama, however, has no counterpunch to McCain's story (or McCain's attack on Obama). Now in part that's because McCain reversed his story from "experience" to "change/maverick." And in part it's because Obama mistakenly muzzled the 527s who would have branded McCain as the out-of-touch old-politics lobbyist-loving flip-flopper he is

It must also be said that Obama didn't have much of a response to the "experience" frame in the first place because Obama insists on calling McCain a war hero, a man of honor, blah, blah, blah. Not exactly how Rovians winners deal with the Kerry team losers. Indeed, by not forcing McCain to defend the experience frame, by buying into his McCain's frame, it was that much easier for McCain to pivot to a new message.

As I've said, Obama should be rebranding McCain as a make-believe maverick. To get in even more alliteration, I might call him "Me-too McCain" since that covers his disingenuous copying of Obama's change message and his dangerous copying of Bush's policies.

Also, Obama should have gone after McCain as an out of touch elitist -- in fact, he still can. The Obama team let Phil Gramm's "nation of whiners" and "mental recession" lines die in the ether, and seems to have dropped the blockbuster gaff of McCain forgetting how many houses he owns. Yet these fit right in with the make-believe maverick meme. I can assure you, a Rovian winning candidate would still be using those dramatic-irony gaffes regularly. Indeed, Palin continues to talk about Obama's "bitter" comment, and that is from even further back in the campaign.

4. The main reason for Obama to continue pushing the extended metaphor of McCain as an out of touch elitist, aside from the fact that it's true and powerful, is to inoculate himself against the McCain-Palin-Rove onslaught that has begun to frame him as the out of touch elitist in the campaign.

Right now, Obama is diving directly into the "too clever" and "not one of us" extended metaphor that overcame Dukakis, Gore, and Kerry. I suspect that this will be the McCain team's central frame for winning the debates even if he loses them on policy points, since that was how Bush bested Kerry strategically in the debates even though the polls seemed to indicate that, at a tactical level, Kerry won them all. But that is a long story I will come back to closer to the debates.

For now, in passing, I will just note that Sarah Palin is using almost verbatim the exact same attack that Bush used to prove Kerry is not one of us. Palin is attacking Obama's language, that he says one thing to working-class people in the heartland and another thing to his supporters in San Francisco.

I mention McCain's VP mainly to segue into Joe Biden aka "the man who wasn't there." Only lipstickgate spared us from the lead story being Biden saying, Hillary "might have been a better pick than me." The mere utterance of that self-emasculating sentiment makes it true. Needless to say, the McCain campaign immediately said:


"Barack Obama's most important decision of this election, and Biden -- the candidate he selects -- suggests, himself, that he wasn't the right man for the job, and that Hillary Clinton would have been a better choice. Biden certainly has a credible viewpoint on this."

The Biden comment suggests he is speaking from a position of great personal weakness and that he feels completely overshadowed by Palin, which could be a disaster for the VP debate. Taking nothing away from Hillary, whose credentials and experience speak for themselves -- indeed, if Obama loses it will be clear that not choosing Hillary was a mistake -- the choice of Hillary would also have allowed McCain to pivot to being the real change candidate anyway, and opened up Obama to a slew of different attacks. Though it is as certain as death and taxes that Hillary never would have said Joe Biden "might have been a better pick than me."

In any case, the Rovians always find stuff or make stuff up. If the Obama team doesn't understand political messaging, it doesn't really matter who their VP is or what how they are attacked.

Josh Marshall wondered today, "Did Biden forget to mention to Obama that he was retiring from public life in September?" Exactly. If Biden is feeling like the fifth wheel -- fourth wheel? -- he should keep it to himself, buck up, and find a damn message."

A gold star? A hug?