Five reasons why things are now looking up for the Republicans

Benjamin

Yeah. He is up 8 in CBS poll and up 7 in USA Today poll.
Totally a tie.

And finding out Palin has hired a criminal lawyer and that she used to belong an party that advocated Alaska independence is SUCH an election winner.
And never mind the fact every journalist wants to know what her experience is and why she wasn't vetted.

But other than that, everything is going GREAT for McCain.

LOL

LS

Benjamin, I believe those are polls of registered voters, not likely voters. Polls of registered voters always massively overstate the Democrats.

Fraser Nelson

Benjamin, the links to my blog didn't come up but for more on the "Sarah Palin ate my bounce" line I refer to click here. http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/08/31/obama.mccain.poll/

Austin Barry

(6) Obama's Denver lovefest confirmed him to be self-regarding, insufferably smug, arrogant and supercilious. He has long ago convinced himself that he is the brightest, most articulate and charismatic cookie in the pack. You can almost see him each morning standing in front of his bathroom mirror, smoothing his eyebrows with his fingers and saying, "Damn, Barack, you are one good-looking happenin' dude". I'm not sure his demeanour plays well anywhere other than among the barmy Obama army of tortured self-hating liberals anticipating the Second Coming or, like a sodden infant, the necessity for "Change".

GS London

I try not to like John McCain, but I fail. Equally I try to like Barack Obama, but I fail. And now McCain has trumped Obama by choosing a seeminglt principled woman as his running mate. I think Obama is being left with his trousers down.

JONNY

Could I be bold enough to add a 6th.
America is still at heart (despite all protestations to the contrary) a deeply racially-biased country.
Obama hasn't a hope in the world.

voice from the uk and europe

Benjamin totally agree ...
I don’t have any problem with women being vice president or president but America going have really question the judgment of McCann firstly he send his wife to Georgia now he take on a women who only been in politics for 23 months , what happen if he has step down for 2-6 weeks because of heart by-pass she be in charge , American need to get over this colour thing and vote for other guy’s because mccann and running mate look like death ticket not dream

biggestaspidistra

GS writes: I try not to like John McCain, but I fail. Equally I try to like Barack Obama, but I fail.

Me too. And most worrying of all, today I find myself agreeing with Polly Toynbee.

Oscar

For all his talk of 'change' and breaking the Washington mould, it's Obama who's stuck with the oldtime Washington insiders by appointing Biden and McCain who has genuinely broken out of the Washington elite. No wonder the pundits are traumatised and digging for dirt on Palin. They like to talk about change, but they don't like real threats to the power of the old elite, where they've developed such cosy relationships.

JONNY

So you find Obama
'self-regarding, insufferably smug, arrogant and supercilious'

Sorry Austin Barry I can't agree.
But it I do believe it fits Young Miliband like a glove.

THX1138

Fraser- Is that the best you can do, pretty thin list Gustav will blow over & only Palin will last beyond this week & that still has a lot to play out especially & she could be overwhelmed in scandal or make some terrible faux pas at any time.

I don't think she will help him outside the base.

Even McCains Own spokesman Tucker Bounds doesn't seem sure what experience she has.

http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=UYYiw_y2qDI&eurl

Austin Barry

Jonny, I agree, but I would also add "with knobs on" for the sneering fruit of a Marxist's loins.

Captain Coma

Had Obama taken HC as his running mate he would be a slam-dunk for the Whitehouse now. She would have been a pain for him, but still. Problem is he can't stand to share the limelight with anybody.

Choosing Biden put him evens with McCain and lost him the advantage, because what's Joe Biden?

McCain choosing Palin tipped the scales. She'll pull in a lot of Hillary women, Dems or not.

McCain to win by between 1 and 2% unless Pailn flames out.

By the way, I'm falling around laughing listening to the BBC reporters robbed - robbed! - of their Norlins/Republican disaster. The dismay in their voices is almost too sweet to bear. Naughty storm for going away!

THX1138

Captain Coma- "She'll pull in a lot of Hillary women, Dems or not."

Actually & strangely by a 23-point margin, women do not think Palin is ready to be President, whereas Palin lost this question among men by a considerably smaller 6-point margin.

From a Very recent Rasmussen Reports poll.

Verity

Jonmny, who specialises in stream-of-conscious vacuity, if that's not a contradiction in terms, writes"Could I be bold enough to add a 6th.
America is still at heart (despite all protestations to the contrary) a deeply racially-biased country.
Obama hasn't a hope in the world."

With your kind permission, although I endorse the your position that Obama does't have a hope, I'd like to nominate this as the most stupid post run since the inuguration of this very fine blog. Obama's position as a no-hoper has nothing to do with him being semi-black. More for having been a greedy, obliging bagman in the foot-deep sleaze of Chicago for so many years. And for his preternatural avarice in sincerely believing that someone who had been in the national politics for all of a year is qualified to be the most powerful person in the world. He spent the following 18 months neglecting the constituents who put him in Congress running a sustained campaign of unalloyed self-aggrandisement. So now he's been in the national Senate for 2 1/2 years and has done what? I would say he is clinically insane. At least Hitler, with his mass rallies, had a dream for Germany, whatever we think of it. Obama just has a dream for Obama.

When little Jonny bobble-head says America is racist, does he mean Americans don't like Chinese or Japanese Americans? Hispanics?

I would say that white Americans feel more of a sense of kinship with their black countrymen than they do with the more recent immigrant groups from Asia and south of the border.

They share a commone history, after all, and have been in N America for roughly the same length of time. (Except Obama, who is hitching a rree ride on the experience and pain of tens of thousands of others, who were taken to America in chains in the holds of slave ships. He's not an "Afro-American".)

What a slapper.

THX1138

Obama goes over 50% for the first time on the Gallup daily tracking.

http://www.gallup.com/poll/109960/Gallup-Daily-Obama-Hits-50-First-Time.aspx

Don't click the link if you're a squeamish McCain supporter.

Oscar

I think it's time to call in the shrinks to analyse why there's been quite such a feeding frenzy over SP. Some strange subterranean neuroses at play here for sure.

Keith Brody

I think this is an optimistic view. Perhaps I'm being overly cynical but:

1. The downgrading of Gustav was good for the people of New Orleans but at best was a wash for McCain. While he might have shone as a leader in a crisis, letting the air out of the balloon before the party at best didn't hinder him and certainly didn't help.

2. McCain didn't dither about the convention? True. So what? I don't think anyone would take hedging bets in the wake of Katrina to be a demonstration of sound judgement and leadership. McCain did the right thing, but a big win? No way.

3. It'll take more than two cancelled speeches to rid McCain of Bush and Cheney!

4. Backlash against a tasteless media is rightly, and finally, the vogue so -- correct -- middle America will not be deluged by stories about Palin's pregnant teenage daughter. They will, however, think precisely the same things they would have had the deluge occurred. The story will do the Republicans no good whatsoever. Damage limitation, to those who can see the wood for the trees, will remain the order of the day.

5. Yes, interest in Palin has taken the spotlight off Obama. And one suspects he is delighted. Rather dodging attempts to knock him from his perch in his hour of triumph, just when the questions should be getting really tough, instead attention is focussed on what, until she proves otherwise, is a story that, on the whole, is a net negative for McCain. Obama has plenty of time left to flex his oratorical muscles and, doubtless, has no interest in peaking too early. For now, he'll be happy attention is focussed on what the public percieve is the weakest part of the Republican ticket.

Seems to me that if one can take an objective rather than rose-tinted Republican point of view, McCain's is a campaign in a heap of trouble right now.