Obama Turns the Corner in the Polls

September 25, 2008

Richard J. Garfunkel

Looks like fortunes have been changing for the
Democratic ticket since my last 50 state survey. I'll work on a new one this
rainy weekend. As I thought, Sarah Palin's novelty has worn
thin and the “blush is off her rose.” A plurality of the
public does not feel she is qualified, what else is new? McCain's
flip-flops and grandstanding is eroding his numbers and in the words of James
Carville, “It’s the economy stupid!” Maybe his ads which have
pretzeled the truth are starting to backfire with the press, the moderates and
the non-gullible.

The latest October surprise is one promulgated by the Three
Blind Mice: Bush, Paulson and Bernanke. Wasn't it only in the spring when
Paulson and George (Herbert Hoover) Bush told us don't worry, “prosperity
is just around the corner.”  And wasn't a few days ago that ancient
John McCain thought that the economy was fundamentally on solid ground. Well
according to the Three Blind Mice, the ground is trembling. All one had to do
was listen to another impossible performance by our fearless leader in his
monotonic, no animation style to find out how disengaged he is regarding
his day job. As the NY Times said in its lead editorial “He
could have offered a great deal more than an eerily dispassionate primer on
credit markets in which he took no responsibility at all for the financial
debacle.” When has this guy ever taken any responsibility I ask of
Lewis “Scooter” Libby?

What else could one expect from this heir to the political
legacies of Franklin Pierce, James Buchanan, US Grant, Warren Harding, Calvin
Coolidge, and Herbert Hoover? He even makes Jimmy Carter, look sincere, honest,
intelligent and engaged. The Times went on to say, “In the end,
Mr. Bush's appearance was just another reminder of something that has been
worrying us throughout this crisis the absence of any real national
leadership…”

Of course everything this Medusa of ill-tidings touches
or says turns around to stone. His ideas range from A to B, and they can be
summed up in two words, “cut taxes.” By the way for your friends that
are “supply-siders,” a recent published study proved that tax cuts do
not generate more revenues, Surprise, surprise!

So here we are facing a bailout of $700 billion which
is equivalent to 25% of last year's US Budget and makes the costs of
the ongoing morass in Afghanistan
and Iraq
look like peanuts. But the greatest irony of this whole mess is that the
fractured Republican Party is running against itself on this issue. McCain
decided to fly to the rescue while supposedly suspending his campaign.
Another lie! His campaign proceeds, his commercials air, and the
machinery of his apparatus is still on the move, But before his
mad dash to Washington he made sure that he had a stop-over in NYC to
schmooze with Katie Couric. He stated that he would rather be a
patriot first and a candidate second, even if it costs him the election. I
agree! This seems to be another act in his farcical campaign
melodrama that brought us the hurricane suspended convention, Sarah Palin,
the golden girl from the Yukon,
and now the abandonment of the debate at Old Miss.  But Obama and the
public was not sucked into this black hole of fabrication. Barack Obama intends
to be at the debate, and I assume big John McCain, who would
rather be in the Hanoi Hilton, will show up also. He would also like
to have Sarah Palin have her first full press conference on the Alaskan tundra
with the caribou and her dogsled. I assume they would
want to have her VEEP debate the opening night of the World
Series. Look for more fun and games before this one is wrapped up!