Rethinking The Iraq Critics
Personal And Economic Recovery
Rev. Wright Launches Own 24-Hr. Channel; All Wright, All The Time, Preacher Promises
Horse Race Or An Honest Dialogue On Race Relations In America?
McCain Freaks Out
The Price of Delay
Wright's Tune Has a Familiar Ring
Race Cards And Speech Codes
A White Girl for Obama
Did Israel Drive Out The Arabs 60 Years Ago?
The Real Meaning of Mother's Day
It's Over
Recession, Recession, Where's The Recession?
End The Mistreatment of Race Horses
Playing Nice
Playing Performance Politics
An Indictment of Our Army’s Competence
Take That, Big Oil!
Presidential Pariah
Harper's Index
Obamicans Pile On Clinton At Own Peril
What John McCain Told Me, And What It Says About How Far He’s Fallen
‘The Change You Deserve’
Should We Impoverish The Persian Gulf?
Springtime Is Our Time And Viva Sweet Love
Apology Denied
In Visit To Israel, Bush Can Prevent A War With Iran
Too Late To The Duck Hunt
Sore Dems Want Out of Proportion Primaries
Vote For Justice
Breeding Sorrow
U.S. Must Stay In Iraq Till Day Is Done And Victory Won
Barack Obama's Bitter Half
Hillary And The Golden Handshake
Why Won't Hillary Adopt The Huckabee Option?
New Orleans Advances -- Slowly
McCainiac
Petronomics 101
McCain, Huckabee And The Evangelicals
Pursuing The Elusive White Voter
What Works: Freedom Project Instills Lofty Dreams In Black Students
If On The Wrong Track, Why Go Left?
The Caniddate And The Pastor
Needed -- Will Rogers
The Other Obama
Congressional Districts Deny Democracy
Hillary’s Role: Exit Stage Left
Hazy Thinking On Medical Marijuana
Battle of The Hawks
Students Take Flight Through Readers' Generosity
The Losing Candidate's Public Pain
Taking Out The Junk -- Interview With Steven Milloy
In Defense of ‘Big Oil’
It's Islamic Jihad, Not Extremism, Uncle Sam
Letter To African-Americans
Mississippi Harbinger
West Virginia: Then And Now



A Perfect Calm For John McCain
Froma Harrop 5/8/2008
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John McCain has used these weeks of Republican calm to dive into the Democratic lunch pail. This strategy clearly assumes a Barack Obama candidacy. If demographics are destiny — as the political sages keep telling us — Democratic demographics may offer some choice cuts to the presumed Republican nominee. By dumb luck, Republicans have chosen their one candidate who projects a moderate image, hasn't alienated Latinos and offers an appealing life story to boot.

The core problem for Democrats is that Obama's backers are reliable Democrats, whereas Hillary Clinton's are unreliable Democrats. Less than half of the Clinton voters in Indiana said they would support Obama in a general election, which is a very bad sign. Add these largely blue-collar and rural whites to some swinging independents and you have a potential Big Mac Value Meal for McCain.

As the Democratic rivals continued their Deathmatch, McCain was rippling his compassion muscles before some of the wavering groups. His tour of the civil-rights battlefields and devastated New Orleans neighborhoods had zero to do with courting the black vote, which, with Obama running, would be totally out of play. The visits with poor rural blacks were choreographed to impress comfortable white suburbanites, who demand sensitivity on matters of race.

McCain's planned
July address before the National Council of La Raza must be helping Mylanta sales near Democratic headquarters. Latinos have been a Clinton constituency, but as George W. Bush proved, they are amenable to voting for a friendly Republican. As co-author of the failed grand compromise on immigration — widely scorned as weak on enforcement — McCain can expect a warm reception by La Raza.

In making such overtures, though, McCain risks losing the tenderloin of Clinton's support — working-class whites.

Obama has done terribly with this group. And it's not just the old people. Pollsters at ABC News found Clinton leading Obama by 19 percentage points even among 30- to 40-year-old white voters who didn't go to college.

Obama will not doubt toil to close that gap, but his challenge is considerable. More problematic than his preference of pastor is his penchant for waxing sociological about rural whites. His comments at a fundraiser in San Francisco were regrettable for dismissing working whites' affection for religion and guns as an outgrowth of bitterness over their declining economic prospects. And still more damaging was the audience to which he was confiding — the money masters who lay American workers off, or order the companies they invest in to do so, or neatly send their programming work to Romania.
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Saw Long Primaries -color
By Frederick Deligne  - Nice-Matin, France  * Posted 05/01/2008
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Saw Long Primaries -color
© Copyright 2008   Frederick Deligne  - All Rights Reserved.
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