My wife is scared. She doesn't follow politics nearly as closely as I do (which is too much - I start cheering when Chuck Todd comes on TV), but she's smart and informed, and, more importantly, cares.
So the polls are even, the McCain impugn-o-matic machine is set to ludicrous speed, and about half the folks who voted for Hillary are either jumping the Democratic ship, or at least browsing the lifeboats.
Original post at Near Earth Object
What do I think? I think the race is far tighter than it should be. I would think it was laughable - were the stakes not so high - that a Democrat as talented as Obama (and with the finest taste in running mates since WJC) might really, honestly lose to the animated corpse of what was once John McCain, during a year in which it has been made clear to just about everybody with a functioning neocortex that the Republicans don't have any idea what the fuck is going on.
This evening, I find that two writers far more intelligent than I have knocked my expectations back and forth as though in a game of very slow tennis.
First, Jacob Weisberg fuels my fears in Newsweek:
If it makes you feel better, you can rationalize Obama's missing 10-point lead on the basis of Clintonite sulkiness, his slowness in responding to attacks or the concern that he may be too handsome, brilliant and cool to be elected. But let's be honest: the reason Obama isn't ahead right now is that he trails badly among one group, older white voters. He lags with them for a simple reason: the color of his skin.
and...
You may or may not agree with Obama's policy prescriptions, but they are, by and large, serious attempts to deal with the biggest issues we face: a failing health-care system, oil dependency, income stagnation and climate change. To the rest of the world, a rejection of the promise he represents wouldn't just be an odd choice by the United States. It would be taken for what it would be: sign and symptom of a nation's historical decline.
America's decline? Oh no!
But he's right. In 2000, the stakes seemed low. A lot of people really didn't seem to think it mattered who was president. Hell, I have a man-crush on Al Gore, and I barely thought it mattered. And let there be no doubt, Americans blew it with Bush's reelection, but true disaster of the epic proportions we would soon see was only looming. Now there's no excuse. Things are bad, and they're bad everywhere. Obama might not be the magic cure, but McCain will rip out the sutures and reinfect the wound.
And that's where Frank Rich knocked my expectations to the other side of the net, and gave me a little morale boost. He thinks the case against McCain is way obvious, and that Obama's task is easier than it was in the primaries. He says polls show, despite some recent losses, that Obama has already won the battle over which candidate is "on our side," and it is now up to Obama to "rekindle the 'fierce urgency of now'" by telling "a story that is more about America and the future and less about Obama and his past." Of McCain, he writes,
Is a man who is just discovering the Internet qualified to lead a restoration of America’s economic and educational infrastructures? Is the leader of a virtually all-white political party America’s best salesman and moral avatar in the age of globalization?
No! That's great, but I still don't know what to think. Politics has become not so much a battle between the top and the bottom of the barrel, but over who scrapes up the vilest dregs. Let he who turns his opponent into a risible feeb be our leader! I don't know if we can win that battle, so until the Obama folks can turn the game from Rock 'em-Sock 'em Robots to Stratego, I am going to hold my breath and, I suppose, hope.