It is a question that has hovered over Senator Barack
Obama even as he has passed milestone after milestone in his race
for the White House: Why is he not doing better?
Years ago I was taught that a useful tool for analyzing a question was to rephrase it as its opposite just to see how it stands up. Let's take a look at that, shall we?
Based on the last few Presidential elections and unreliable common knowledge there is a base of around 40% who would never vote for one of the candidates or the other. That leaves about 20% of the electorate in play.
One recent poll showed Senator Obama leading by 8 points. (It's an example. Don't think for a heartbeat that it's anything definitive.) If the Undecideds break even (Another unsubstantiated assumption. Remember that the particular polls aren't the point of the post.) then Senator Obama leads McCain something like 54-46 in the November.
Which brings us back to Charlie's cut-and-pasted question, rephrased. Why are so few people willing to support McCain?
GWB viewed his scant 3% spanking of Senator Kerry to be a landslide. With McCain hanging on to a deficit 3 times the size of the one that sent the Senator packing 4 years ago, what has John McCain done to show that he even belongs in the race?
McCain is already playing around in the margin-of-error sandbox. How many more of the Bush dead-enders are there that he can lose?
This is just another smokescreen of unattainable goals that the right would put in the path of Senator Obama. They know that they have a badly flawed candidate who stands little chance in a head-to-head matchup and that their only hope of winning is to turn the election into a referendum on Senator Obama.
Now that McCain has abandoned his campaign of honor and begun his race to the bottom we may find out how low he can go in more ways than one.
