ronhoon's Blog

Here we are just days away from the election, and who knows what to make of these polls?  Two national polls now say that McCain has closed the gap so substantially on Obama, that it's back to being very close to a tie.  Gallup says it's a two point lead for Obama, Rasmussen says it's a three point lead.  That's way down from numbers we saw a week ago that had him up by as much as 14 points.

Another poll known as the GWU/Battleground is interesting.  It has been saying the race is quite close, 3 points, for at least the last four days.  It also shows there was a huge spike for Obama back around October 10th.  That happens to be the very day the stock market hit it's lows and it felt like the whole economy was coming apart.  Then...this poll shows it was a 13 point lead for Obama.  But what happened in the following days?  Obama's famous encounter with "Joe the Plumber."  You remember, when he said he favored the idea of a government that "spread the wealth around." 

Still, there are other polls showing Obama's lead is more like 7 points, or greater.  Pew Research had it as a whopping 15 point lead for the Illinois senator.  So..what is it?  Two points or 15?  The trend appears, in the last few days, to be moving toward McCain...but whether he can overtake Obama and make this a competitive election depends on one thing:  Which poll right now is right?  If it's Gallup or Rasmussen...closing a 2 or 3 point gap is very likely.  But if it's Pew...there's no way.

One reason these numbers might be so different, is the pollsters struggle to figure out who really is going to vote.  We all know Obama has had a huge get out the vote machine working for him.  There are literally hundreds of thousands of new voters who've registered.  A judge in Ohio has said it is OK for homeless people to list the address of a park bench if they wanted to vote in that state.  So...with all this happening, I think the election might revolve around all these new voters Obama's been signing up.  If they show up en masse, it's his...but if all that enthusiasm at the rallies doesn't translate into people driving to the polls next Tuesday (which is the big unknown), McCain could pull off one more upset in his long campaign of suprises.

With a growing number of comparisons to the Great Depression...more and more Americans are starting to grasp the scope of the financial crisis facing our country.  And today John McCain took the nearly unprecedented step of suspending his campaign.  He's going back to Washington to work on some sort of solution to the crisis.  It's impossible to know how much of this decision is affecte by politics...we are at the height of the campaign...and how much of it is the sheer demand on his time as the United States Senate debates one of the most important issues it has faced in our lifetimes.

I do know this.  He has angered some Republicans in the past for his willingness to work with Democrats to create compromises on legislation that, in the end, will get them passed.  That was his whole pitch to voters at the convention in St. Paul:  If you want someone who will work with people on both sides of the aisle, you'd better choose me...that's what I've been doing for years.  It's a hard argument for Obama to counter because he just hasn't been in the Senate that long.

Because of his track record, this crisis presents McCain the opportunity to be one of the key people in Congress who puts some sort of package together to try to solve this ridiculous mess that Fannie and Freddie and other mortgage and financial companies got us into.  But make no mistake...this is a high stakes gamble on McCain's part.  If he's successful, it will no doubt enhance his image.  But if he's not, if this whole thing descends into gridlock, it could backfire, and literally cost him the election.

John McCain's pick of Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential running mate has the potential to be a true game changer in the race for the presidency.  Here are a few things about her that you'll be learning in the coming days.

She was born in Sandpoint, Idaho to two school employees, her mom a secretary, and her dad a science teacher and track coach.  They all moved to Alaska when she was a child, and there she developed her love for the outdoors...spending time hunting, ice fishing, and riding snowmobiles. 

After serving on the city council in Wasilla, and serving in some other government positions, she took on the incumbent Republican governor, beating him in the primary, then beating the Democrat, Tony Knowles, in the general election in 2006.

Funny that we all heard so much about the "bndge to nowhere" pork barrel project in Alaska.  It didn't make nearly the headlines when that project was cancelled...by Sarah Palin.  It also sounds like she's butted heads with lots of powerful men in Alaska, either before becoming governor, or since then...and doesn't seem to back down a lot.

We'll learn a lot more about "Sarah Barracuda," which was her nickname was during her years playing for the girls basketball team at Wasilla High School, in the coming days. 

But, I'm wondering if you think the obvious play for Hillary Clinton's supporters, will work.  I know this much...it certainly knocked Barack Obama out of the headlines, just hours after his speech at Invesco in Denver.

Is John Edwards for real?  His wife is fighting cancer, he's just been accused of having an affair and lying about it, and his response is to release a statement that he doesn't respond to lies?  That it's all tabloid trash?  He thinks that will make it go away?

Listen, John Edwards was one of the major candidates for President this year.  Four years ago, he was the Vice-Presidential nominee.  He has spent most of his life developing his reputation.  Think about it.  Isn't that more important than almost anything to him?  I would think so.  So, shouldn't he be absolutely OUTRAGED that the National Enquirer is reporting that he has a mistress and a child with that mistress?  To dismiss this with a brief statement, to pretend that most everyone in the country hasn't already heard about it, doesn't make sense. 

Here's what he should do (at least if he is innocent.)  He should file a Billion dollar lawsuit against the Enquirer.  He should then go under oath, and prove all the reporters who were waiting for him in the basement of that hotel (why not just walk in and out of the lobby if you're not trying to hide anything?) made everything up.  Because someone is lying here.  If it's the reporters for the Enquirer, the tabloid should be forced to pay so much they might as well go out of business.  But if it's John Edwards, he should be called out for being a man who cheats on his wife while she fights cancer, and then lies to all of us about it.

If you were innocent of such sleazy charges wouldn't you file a HUGE lawsuit?  Anything short of that makes John Edwards defense not too believable.

Here's a conversation I found myself having in the newsroom.  Why is there not an unprecedented effort underway from the highest levels of government to try to come up with solutions to the energy crisis?  Seriously, where is the leadership?  Why hasn't President Bush called the top leaders in business together with key people in his administration and the leadership in the House and Senate and said, we're not leaving until we come up with some concrete solutions?  The simple fact that it's just fodder on the campaign trail makes it seem like the two top candidates are just throwing out ideas (John McCain:  Drill More!) (Barack Obama:  Make Smaller Cars!) to see if anything sticks.

In the meantime, $4 gas is slowly choking our economy to death.

I remember having to give a speech on a newsworthy topic during my days in college at the University of Washington.  The problem, as I saw it then, was that we were relying on foreign countries to import approximately 50% of our oil.  That was 1979.  Here we are almost 30 years later, and guess what, we haven't learned anything.  We're now moving toward the unbelievable number of 70% of our oil being imported.  It was a problem 30 years ago, and we've done nothing! 

Oh, no, wait, we have done something.  We've handed our very security and way of life over to Middle Eastern nations that we are now entirely dependent on.  So far that's only brought us to $4 gas.  Imagine what would happen if they decided to shut off the oil.  Don't laugh.  They did it to us in 1973, and it crippled us economically.  And that's when we weren't importing more than 30% of our oil.   Oh, yeah, and we've also allowed our standard of living to slip while enriching places like Dubai as we've sent billions and billions and billions of our dollars to the Middle East.

I know President Bush is in his last year in office.  But to simply wait for the next person to take office and try to come up with some solutions in mid-2009, won't cut it.  No issue...Social Security...Education...Iraq...is as important as this one.  I really don't know what the solution is.  In fact, I don't think there is one solution.  It has to be many things.  Everything should be on the table.  A consensus needs to be built.  This problem needs to be solved...or at least the first big steps need to be taken toward solving it.  Now.

It amazes me, when you consider how fed up about the economy, and Iraq, people are...that John McCain is as close as he is in the polls to Barack Obama.  You would think in a year where voters want to see major changes happen that Obama would be running a 20 point lead in the polls right now.  Instead most show him up by about 5 to 7 points.  And that's after Hillary Clinton drops out, endorses him, bringing along lots of positive coverage.  There is even one poll out there showing that people want change so badly, by a margin of about 15 points, that they are willing to vote for a candidate with little experience (Obama) over someone with a lot of it (McCain.)

It remains to be seen which candidate will get those rural, blue collar voters...who probably didn't like being portrayed as "bitter" by Obama, who have seen their candidate Hillary, drop out...who would identify more with the Democratic Party, but who like John McCain as a war hero.

The key, as we sit now, less than five months out from the general election, is this:  Who can win a handful of battleground states.  Among them: 

OHIO

PENNSYLVANIA

FLORIDA

VIRGINIA

WEST VIRGINIA

MINNESOTA

MICHIGAN

Hey, that almost looks like a college football poll!  (Sorry, I'm getting a little impatient waiting for September.)  But keep an eye on these states in the next several weeks.  Now that the general election matchup has been set, we should see new polls coming out from these battlegrounds soon.  And most of them are wide open.

Two polls in Virginia show entirely different result.  Both taken in late May...one shows Obama up by 7...the other has McCain up by 8 points.  Florida, for now, doesn't appear to be as much of a toss up.  Polls there show McCain up 4 to 11 points.  But then there's Michigan...where a poll in late May showed McCain up 4...shortly after that, another one showed Obama up 3.

This isn't one of those "in the middle" kind of elections, either.  Many observers say Obama has been the single most liberal guy in the U.S. Senate.  And while John McCain isn't the most conservative, he is conservative, more in the fiesty Barry Goldwater mode (another Arizonan with an independent streak.)  So, this time around, the voters have a very clear choice.  And the states listed above will play a huge role in deciding it.

Not that there'll be anything but denials over this report, but apparently some insiders on the campaign trail say that Michelle Obama's dislike for Hillary Clinton is strong enough that she's put the kibosh on any chance of Barack selecting Hillary as Vice-Presidential candidate.

This seems a bit foolish.  The split inside the Democratic party is so strong now that there has to be at least some bad blood between the two leading candidates.   And many voters, as they choose sides, are deciding they really don't like the other candidate.  Check this out:  In the swing state of West Virginia, only four in ten voters in the latest poll said they would vote for the "other" Democrat in November if their candidate didn't win the nomination.  Four in ten! 

It makes sense that the only way to overcome that huge split inside the party is to show to all these voters that these two candidates can get along...can run together...and can work together.  Assuming Obama wins the nomination, that means anywhere from 2 in 10 (according to some national polls) to 4 in 10 of Hillary Clinton's supporters won't vote for him.  However...if she's right there on the ballot with him, you'd think nearly all of them, in fact, would.

But, if there's any truth to these reports, Michelle Obama is going to make sure that doesn't happen.  That would seem to hurt, not help, her husband's chances of winning the Presidency. 

Consider what it would be like to be a Democrat who fought your way through the ice storm in Ohio to cast your vote in the primary election.  Or think what it must've been like to be a Texas Democrat who had to go through their ridiculous "Texas Two Step," where you stand in lines to vote, and then have to go fight the crowds and the mass confusion at a different caucus site to make sure your vote counts there, as well.  Maybe you were so inspired by one of the candidates you took time out of your life to attend rallies, work the phone banks, or go door belling in your neighborhood.

You go through all that, then you come home that night to flip on the TV coverage and see if all that work, all that "citizen involvement," made a difference.  And the first thing you hear is the quote from Barack Obama who says that no matter how people voted, he's going to keep basically the very same lead in delegates that he had before!

Think of that.  All the effort put in by thousands of volunteers didn't, in the end, make any difference.  All the millions of votes cast by people in those states didn't really make any difference, either.  Despite most polls that showed Obama with a lead in Texas in the last few days...Hillary Clinton won the state by 100,000 votes.  And in Ohio, she had a blowout win over Obama, with a margin of victory of more than a quarter of a million votes.  You would think all that would amount to something.  But in the strange world of Democratic party politics, it doesn't.  Despite the headlines over her big "victories," she still came out of the night almost exactly where she was going in...about a hundred delegates behind. 

And now, it's becoming clear that neither will get enough delegates in the votes in the remaining states to win the nomination.  Guess what that means?  The so-called "Super Delegates" of the Democrats will, in the end, decide who gets the nomination. 

So, to make sure you get the significance of this...ALL the votes cast by ordinary voters in every state, from California to New York, in the end, don't matter either.  Thanks folks, but we the party insiders of the Democrats will make the decision!

I've been reading about the farce the election became recently in Russia.  Did anybody doubt Putin's guy would win in a landslide?  Plenty of outrage has been expressed about this in the world's media, and rightly so.  I just wonder when the outrage is going to be expressed by millions of Democrats in this country, who cast their votes in a primary system with such arcane rules, that you could just see this coming.  Seemingly important wins in big states like Ohio and Texas don't really even budge the delegate count...and a system that was set up in such a way that the only votes that will matter are the ones from a few hundred party insiders.

Watching the talking heads during national political news coverage you would think that we have a new way we are electing a president in this country:  Who can get the most momentum.

It's a legitimate topic, don't get me wrong.  Covering "the horse race" does have a certain level of interest.  But anyone with a brain already knows Barack Obama has the momentum for the democrats, and John McCain has at least enough that Mike Huckabee should see the writing on the wall.

But that's about all the mention that "momentum" deserves.

I want to know exactly how much each candidate is going to raise taxes.  Anyone who thinks there's going to be a lot of tax cutting in the next four years should probably think again.

I want to know how they're going to fix Social Security.

I want to know how they're going to wean us off foreign oil, cutting the massive flow of money to the Middle East, and helping the environment by moving us toward solar and other alternate forms of energy.

I want to know specifically what's going to happen to health care in this country.

I want to know how our problem with illegal immigration is going to be solved.

I want to see a more comprehensive plan to solving the threat to our country that still exists among Islamic extremists.

I want to know who is going to take steps to limit the size and influence of government in our lives.

The speeches are starting to bore me.  I hope for all our sakes that voters will start to move beyond that too, and start focusing on the actual specifics that these candidates will employ to solve the truly big problems that we face.

We, in the media, pay so much attention to the horse race when it comes to politics, I think we don't do a very good job of stepping back and looking at the big picture.  There is a bigger story to come out of Super Tuesday than the one you'll read all the headlines about.  After all, John McCain was expected to do well, and he did.  It was expected to be close between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, and it was.  Nothing surprising there. 

But if you take a closer look at the numbers, the biggest story to come out of this national primary was this:  A LOT  more people are voting for Democrats than Republicans.  I just pulled numbers from some of the states where the races were especially close in the polls going into Tuesday, so you'd figure there'd be very high levels of interest among voters in both parties.  Check this out:

The number of people who voted for the top two Democrats in California:

3,750,000

The number of people who voted for the top three Republicans in California:

1,997,000

(True, Democrats have a lead among registered voters here.  But consider this, Hillary Clinton alone got more votes in California than the top three Republicans combined...her 2.06 Millon to their 1.99 Million.  This should be an ominous sign to Republicans who, with popularity of Arnold Schwarzenegger, are thinking they have a chance to win this state in 2008.)

The number of people who voted for the top two Democrats in battleground state of Missouri:

800,000

The number of people who voted for the top three Republicans in Missouri:

552,000

 (This is also an ominous sign for the Republicans as its very difficult to see them winning the Presidency without winning this swing state.)

The number of people who voted for the top two Democrats in the usually reliably RED state of Oklahoma:

358,000

The number of people who voted for the top three Republicans in Oklahoma:

316,000

You can find this trend in state after state that the Republicans need to carry...like Tennessee...and Georgia...in order to counter all the votes in states Democrats normally carry anyway. 

And you should see the Democrat vs. Republican landslide in those places Tuesday (like Massachusetts 1.2 Million vs. 479,000 and New York 1.7 Million vs. 535,000.)

In short, Republicans had better start paying close attention to the message from the electorate, of how fed up people are, and how much they want to see substantive change out of Washington.  True, there's lot of time between now and November on how to figure it out.  But if they don't come up with a compelling argument for voters once they have settled on a nominee, we could all look back on Super Tuesday as the first rumblings of a landslide.

Here is my one-on-one interview with Hillary Clinton.  Among the questions I asked her were why, after that "candid" moment in New Hampshire, we haven't seen more of that instead of what I tell her seems to me just "standard campaign mode."  Interestingly, she has now produced and is just starting to air commercials that recreate that particular emotion, except now with music underneath it! 

I also ask, twice, about the impact of Bill Clinton on her campaign, and if she will change tactics.  We also get into how she thinks she can possibly pay for all her proposed programs.  There is also a follow up to a recent debate question that I'd been wanting to ask her since I saw it more than three weeks ago, regarding terrorists and nuclear weapons.  Here you go...

Don't know if you've seen this yet, but I laughed the first time I saw it.  Mitt Romney gets punked out on the campaign trail.  And the culprit is one of his own kids!

I just wish he would've stood up and yelled at somebody with some kind of rant, once he realized what happened.  Who knows, I heard one of his sons compare their family to the "Royal Tenenbaums," so maybe he's been punked before and this is about all the reaction you get.

This should have been the biggest story of the month on the political trail.  Mike Huckabee, who was actually leading in the national polls, went in front of an audience in Michigan and actually said we needed "to amend the Constitution so it's in God's standards."  Think about that.  The leading candidate saying we need to change the Constitution, the document that helped to create, and then protect, our freedoms for over 200 years, needs to be changed so that we are basically living in a theocracy!

This could very well mark the beginning of the end of the Huckabee campaign.  And the poll numbers that are now coming out from Rasmussen, reflect this.  Take a look:

----------ON 1/16/2008---------

HUCKABEE: 23%

McCAIN:  20%

ROMNEY:  15%

GIULIANI:  12%

THOMPSON:  12%

---------ON 1/22/2008---------

McCAIN:  24%  (UP FOUR POINTS)

ROMNEY:  19%  (UP FOUR POINTS)

HUCKABEE:  16% (DOWN SEVEN POINTS)

GIULIANI:  10%  (DOWN TWO POINTS)

THOMPSON:  10% (DOWN TWO POINTS)

That huge 7% drop has got to be a result of his off-the-wall statement.  Even people who are religious should be mortified by a leading candidate saying he wants to start messing around with the Constitution.  It's that Constitution, and its accompanying Bill of Rights that guarantees not just religious freedom, but also that the government won't start getting itself involved in your religion.  This might be the most idiotic statement made on the campaign trail in a hundred years (I guess now I have to go back and see what Taft was saying in 1908.)

I'm not sure if he wants a church-state relationship like the one that existed between the people of England and the Church of England (which brought early settlers to our country in search of religious freedom) or just a flat out theocracy...but that's being tried in Iran right now, Mike, and it's not working out well.

Anyway, the national media mostly focuses on the war of words between Clinton and Obama.  This story hasn't even played second fiddle.  It's way down on the list.  But it shouldn't be.  And enough people are paying attention to it that it's starting to cost the man who said it.

My questions for you are this.  How did he still come within three points of winning last week in South Carolina?  And, why hasn't this been the big headline in the past week from the national media, instead of the constant bickering between the Democrats.

Or did he purposely mislead everyone? I remember being very impressed in the hours after Benazir Bhutto was assasinated that John Edwards had picked up the phone and called Pakistan President Pervez Musharraf. He said they spoke. "Those are some kind of foreign policy credentials," I thought to myself, "I wonder why nobody else but Edwards talked to Musharraf?"

Then at last night's debate he admits there never was any conversation with the leader of Pakistan. He never called him. They never spoke. He called an ambassador! I'm sorry, but I imagine any member of Congress can pick up the phone and call the ambassador. Why did you say you talked to Musharraf?!?

Here's an article to refresh your memory of his original statement:

http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid
=aDxLhWewwKM8&refer=us

And here's what he now admits really happened!

Link: Edwards now admits they didn't talk

Almost 50 years ago, JFK gave a speech that helped resolve people's fears that the Pope would be calling the shots if Kennedy was elected President.  (People actually believed that!)  Today, if someone who is Catholic runs for office, their religion just isn't an issue.  I thought we'd come a long way in the last 50 years, until I saw polls that said a quarter or more of voters might not vote for someone because of their religion...if that religion is Mormon.

I've heard people say, "Well, the church has too much power of its people, telling them how to think and vote."  After 30 years in the church myself, I can tell you that is just not true.  In fact, if someone in the church ever tried, I'd tell 'em to get lost!!!  I guess the best proof that there is, in fact, complete latitude for opinion in the church is this:  The guy who just might be THE most liberal person in the Senate (Harry Reid) and the one who could be considered THE most conservative (Orrin Hatch)...are both Mormon!

Still, I wonder if Romney's speech made much of a difference to people who'd already made up their minds.  Tell me what you think.