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President Obama? Here's how Monday, Jun 9, 2008 By John Brummett An Arkansas woman who'd like to vote Democratic because of the messes the Republicans have made asks me to address her question. How could anyone think that Barack Obama might be elected president? The very idea seems thoroughly implausible to her. She hears those screeching preachers from Obama's church, or former one. She learns about Obama's wife saying she'd never before been proud of this country. She knows that Obama is an African-American, and, frankly, she runs into people every day who betray a problem with that. She reads that Obama spent a couple of elementary grades in Indonesia at a school affiliated with the Muslim religion. She's heard that he will be the most liberal man ever to receive a major party's nomination for president. She knows a lot of women are highly aggravated that Hillary didn't get the nomination and won't slide easily to her male vanquisher's side. If the Democrats haven't lost their minds, could I please explain to this woman how and where their supposed sanity exists? Why, certainly. First, just about any Democrat anymore can count on 150 or so electoral votes, needing 271, especially with Republicans so spectacularly unpopular at the moment. Any Democrat would take California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Oregon, Washington, Hawaii and the District of Columbia. So the race comes down a few competitive states that could provide the necessary 120 or so electoral votes. The conventional larger battlegrounds are Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa and Maryland. But there are newly emerging swing states. Virginia, with all those moderate suburbanites, is competitive. You have a few places out west where Latinos and environmentalists help the Democrats. Those are Colorado, New Mexico and Nevada. You'd normally put Arizona in that group, but surely John McCain will win his home state. If Libertarian candidate Bob Barr, a Georgian and former Republican congressman, could get 6 to 8 percentage points in Georgia, all peeled off McCain, Obama would suddenly be in the game in a delegate-rich Southern state. So Obama needs only to emphasize a dozen to 15 states. Consider, then, that his campaign has emerged as the most well-organized and best at raising money of any of the modern era. He can flood those battlegrounds with Internet-raised millions and fervent, smartly functioning volunteers. Combine that with the fact that McCain provides Obama with a Republican opponent less effective than he at fund-raising and who generates little excitement or calls to action in the conservative base. Then consider that there are only three issues. One is the war in Iraq. Most Americans think it was mistakenly waged and that we should get out. That's Obama's position, not McCain's. There's the economy. Most people blame the Republicans for corporate-friendly mismanagement, and, anyway, McCain told The Wall Street Journal he doesn't know much about the economy. There's expanding the availability of health insurance, and Obama has a more ambitious plan than McCain, who seems to want to do away with employer-based coverage and give everyone a tax credit with which to take their pre-existing conditions into the ruthless free market. McCain is a stumbling communicator beyond his energetic prime. Obama is a poetic communicator in his energetic prime. So Obama's task seems relatively simple. He needs to raise tons of money. He needs to run hard in about 12 states. He needs to say three things over and over again - that he'll end the war, but McCain won't; that he'll fix the economy, but McCain won't; and that he'll expand health insurance, but McCain won't. That only leaves one thing, which is not getting swift-boated by these "independent" groups that will seek to smear him, probably more viciously than anything we've seen against Bill Clinton or Michael Dukakis or John Kerry. It sounds do-able. ------- John Brummett is an award-winning columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock and author of "High Wire," a book about Bill Clinton's first year as president. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com. |
