Sunday, November 16, 2008

So, And What Happened?

In the New Yorker:-

Last June, Joel Benenson, who was Barack Obama’s top pollster during his Presidential run, reported on the state of the campaign. His conclusions, summed up in a sixty-slide PowerPoint presentation, were revealed to a small group...The primaries were over, Hillary Clinton had conceded, and Obama had begun planning for a race against Senator John McCain.

There was good news and bad in Benenson’s presentation. Obama led John McCain, forty-nine per cent to forty-four per cent, among the voters most likely to go to the polls in November, but there was also a large group of what Benenson called “up-for-grabs” voters, or U.F.G.s, who favored McCain, forty-eight per cent to thirty-six per cent. The U.F.G.s were the key to the outcome; if the election had been held then, Obama would have probably lost.


And?

...the presentation explained, “Obama’s image is considerably better defined than McCain’s, even on attributes at the core of McCain’s reputation,” such as “stands up to lobbyists and special interests,” “puts partisan politics aside to get things done,” and “tells people what they need to hear, not what they want to hear.”

...Benenson’s polling was revelatory. “Voters actually did not know as much as I think the press corps thought they did about John McCain,” Anita Dunn, a senior adviser to Obama, told me. “What they’d heard about McCain most recently, and certainly during the primary process, was that he was like every other Republican — fighting to sound more like George Bush.” Benenson said, “What we knew at the start of the campaign was that the notion of John McCain as a change agent and independent voice didn’t exist anywhere outside the Beltway.”


There's more.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Looking at the electoral maps for the past 2 elections made me think of the extent to which the American People has been swindled during this last electoral cycle. Note that the ‘redness’ of the map actually increased in 08. (Red=republicans Blue=Democrats amazingly)

The results of the elections do not reflect the ‘will of the people’, but amounts to a veritable ‘coup d’état’ perpetrated against the American people without firing a single shot and in plain sight. Three major aspects of the campaign come to mind to justify this statement.

1. The Democrats had close to 7 times more money available from donations than the Republicans. A lot of these moneys were collected from anonymous sources and even from outside of the US. ( $ 460,000,000.00 vs. 85,000,000.00 ?)
2. The so called ‘main stream media’ which is the major source of information for most of the populace exhibited an amazing level of bias in reporting and even engaged in actually ‘promoting’ the Democratic candidates while never showing any interest in the most salient questions relating to the background, experience and prior associations of the candidates. (Example: If it had surfaced the information that McCain had for 20 years participated in weekly meetings of the KKK this would have spelled doom for his candidacy. Not so for Obama and the Church of Rev. Wright.)
3. The ‘community organization’ type of movements assisted the Democrats in collecting or ‘bringing out the vote drives’. In a military type of disciplined effort they may have been able to gather perhaps a few million votes in key states and were instrumental to closing the deal.

Given these circumstances however, we still have the amazing fact that the Democrats never at any one time really pulled ahead in the polls which signifies that the election was won through the effects of unfair and illegal manipulation of factors exterior to the public opinion. (52 % to 46 % ?) Without any of the three factors mentioned above they would not have won.