Measuring the Curtains?

By Howard Kurtz
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, October 10, 2008 9:47 AM

Contrarian thought for the day:

Could all the recent poll-driven chatter about how Barack Obama is sewing up the election come back to bite him?

Ordinarily, a candidate wants to be like a hot stock. (Eh, maybe not a great analogy in this market.) You want people talking up your value, which gives other people confidence to invest in you, which in turn creates more confidence that you're heading up. But, of course, you don't want your bubble to burst.

It may well be that the soothsayers are right: Obama is moving up in the key battlegrounds, he's playing in red states, Gallup tracking gives him an 11-point lead, the imploding economy helps him and makes it hard for John McCain to play catchup in the remaining 3 1/2 weeks. But here are some potential downsides:

· Obama's supporters assume he's got a lease on the Oval Office and some -- especially those newly registered voters -- don't bother to turn out.

· The polls turn out to be overstating Obama's strength, in part because some respondents aren't honest about being willing to vote for a black candidate.

· Obama comes to be seen as the semi-incumbent, and as things get worse, voters wonder whether the new guy can handle a crisis of this magnitude and experience a bit of buyer's remorse. (This, in my view, happened to Hillary Clinton during the primaries, when she initially ran a cautious, front-runner's campaign and lost the sense that she represented change, both as a woman and a challenger.)

These may well be problems worth having. Since Obama would succeed 43 white presidents, he might benefit from Americans getting used to the idea that he can, and perhaps will, make it to the White House. But elections have a way of tightening toward the end. Obama needs a big turnout in those half-dozen key states. And a sense that the contest is effectively over could diminish the voter surge he needs.

Politico runs the numbers and uses the L word:

"Three weeks of historic economic upheaval have done more than just tilt a handful of once reliably Republican states in Barack Obama's direction. Democratic strategists are now optimistic that the ongoing crisis could lead to a landslide Obama victory. Four large states John McCain once seemed well-positioned to win -- Virginia, North Carolina, Ohio and Florida -- have in recent weeks shifted toward Obama. If Obama were to win those four states -- a scenario that would represent a remarkable turn of events -- he would likely surpass 350 electoral votes.

"Under almost any feasible scenario, McCain cannot win the presidency if he loses any of those four states. And if Obama actually captured all four states, it would almost certainly signal a strong electoral tide that would likely sweep the Southwestern swing states -- Colorado, New Mexico, Nevada -- not to mention battlegrounds from New Hampshire to Iowa to Missouri."

From the right, George Will sees similar math:

"In the closing days of his 10-year quest for the presidency, McCain finds it galling that Barack Obama is winning the first serious campaign he has ever run against a Republican. Before Tuesday night's uneventful event, gall was fueling what might be the McCain-Palin campaign's closing argument. It is less that Obama has bad ideas than that Obama is a bad person . . .

Obama is competitive in so many states that President Bush carried in 2004 -- including Florida, North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio, Indiana, Iowa, Colorado and New Mexico -- it is not eccentric to think he could win at least 350 of the 538 electoral votes."

Stats expert Nate Silver, in the New Republic, is bullish on Bama:

"John McCain is in deep trouble. In spite of some incremental gains that McCain has made in some of the national tracking polls, the set of state polling that follows is so strong for Obama that he continues to hit record marks in all three of our projection metrics. We are now projecting Obama to win the election 90.5 percent of the time, with an average of 346.8 electoral votes, and a 5.4-point margin in the national popular vote.

"There simply isn't any good news in here for John McCain (all right, he's kicking butt in Oklahoma)."

Hold on, says Karl Rove, Obama doesn't have this locked up:

"Each faces a big challenge. Mr. McCain's is that events have tilted the field towards Mr. Obama. To win, Mr. McCain must demonstrate he stands for responsible conservative change, while portraying Mr. Obama as an out-of-the-mainstream liberal not ready to be president.

"Mr. Obama's test is that voters haven't shaken deep concerns about his lack of qualifications. Having accomplished virtually nothing in his three years in the Senate except to win the Democratic nomination, Mr. Obama must show he is up to the job. Voters like him, conditions favor him, yet he has not closed the sale. He may be approaching the finish line with that mixture of lassitude and insouciance he displayed in the spring against Mrs. Clinton.

"But here's a warning sign for Mr. Obama. Of recent candidates, only Michael Dukakis in 1988 has had a larger percentage of voters tell pollsters they believe he lacks the necessary qualifications to be president."

When I was out with Obama, I did not see lassitude. And haven't the two debates helped him show he's "up to the job"?

Yet another poll brings him good news:

"A new USA TODAY/Gallup Poll showed that viewers of the second presidential debate have more confidence that Obama can handle the economy. By a more than a 2-to-1 margin, however, debate viewers have less confidence that McCain can deal with the nation's economic problems.

"The poll of 735 debate viewers taken Wednesday, a day after the candidates faced off in Nashville, also showed the debate helped boost confidence in Obama's ability to address defense and foreign policy issues, 33% vs. 27%. McCain, meanwhile, lost ground: 30% now have less confidence in him to handle these issues, which are usually a strong point for the former Navy pilot."

Joe Klein sees a broader reason for Obama's recent success:

"If Barack Obama is elected president of the United States on Nov. 4 -- a prospect that is beginning to seem likely now -- it may turn out that he closed the deal with a simple answer to a not-so-simple question posed by Tom Brokaw in the second presidential debate: 'Is health care in America a privilege, a right or a responsibility?' . . .

"In a collapsing economy, government regulation -- forcing insurers to cover everyone at reasonable rates -- sounds more comforting than stultifying.

"The desire for more government activism is true across the board. All of a sudden, government-provided infrastructure programs -- and that's what most of McCain's despised 'earmarks' are -- don't sound like such a waste of money, especially if they are married to alternative energy sources and conservation (which is why Obama talks constantly about 'retrofitting' buildings to conserve energy). All of a sudden, boring bureaucracies like the Securities and Exchange Commission, which have been undermined and underfunded by Republicans, become a crucial bulwark against the rampaging free-market anarchists on Wall Street."

With apologies to Bill Clinton, The Era of Big Government is Back? Or just better-run government?

And speaking of Bubba, the Boston Globe observes:

"Barack Obama likes to draw inspiration from Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King Jr., but his apparent role model of late is someone a bit more contemporary: Bill Clinton.

"With the economy in crisis and Election Day in sight, Obama can't say enough about the Clinton epoch -- the job growth, the budget surpluses, the broad prosperity -- and often lauds the former president's economic stewardship as a model.

" 'We need to do what we did in the 1990s and create millions of new jobs and not lose them,' he told 6,000 people in Abington, outside Philadelphia, last week. 'We need to do what we did in the 1990s and make sure people's incomes are going up and not down. We need to do what a guy named Bill Clinton did in the 1990s and put people first again.' The crowd roared.

"Obama's characterization of Clinton's presidency is markedly different than the one he offered during the Democratic primaries, when he was running against Clinton's wife, Senator Hillary Clinton."

Ya think?

But here's a wild card for Obama:

"About 94 percent of adult Americans have heard at least one obviously false rumor about the major presidential candidates, according to a first-of-its kind national survey of 1,015 adults conducted by Scripps Howard News Service and Ohio University.

"The most common rumors swirled around Obama's religion, with 89 percent of those polled saying they had heard he was Muslim, and nearly two-thirds said they found the rumor believable," says the New York Post.

"More than half heard that Obama refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance or to display the flag, even though he usually wears a flag pin on his lapel."

Time's David Von Drehle has been roaming around Missouri and plumbing people's racial attitudes:

"There's still time to change again, for doubts to resurface, for suspicions to harden. And voters may say one thing to pollsters and do another in the voting booth. Yet at this late stage of the campaign, after dozens of interviews across this toss-up state, evidence suggests that the issue that once seemed as if it would dominate this election -- Obama's race -- is not consuming the people who will actually decide . . .

"Obama's promises are not necessarily more credible to these skeptical voters, but he has the advantage of being undeniably new. He is toting a lot of unusual baggage, but for many voters, that is outweighed by the fact that he isn't more of the same."

Sarah Palin may or may not be found to have improperly pressured her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, to fire her ex-brother-in-law, Michael Wooten. But as this New York Times piece, starting with a call from a Palin aide, makes clear, she had him in her sights like a fleeing caribou:

"As Mr. Monegan recalls it, the aide said the governor had heard that Trooper Wooten was assigned to work the kickoff to the fair in late August. If so, Mr. Monegan should do something about it, because Ms. Palin was also planning to attend and did not want him nearby.

"Somewhat bewildered, Mr. Monegan soon determined that Trooper Wooten had indeed volunteered for duty at the fairgrounds -- in full costume as 'Safety Bear,' the troopers' child-friendly mascot."

Guess you could say she was loaded for bear.

" . . . Two years earlier, the trooper and the governor's sister had been embroiled in a nasty divorce and child-custody battle that had hardened the Palin family against him. To Mr. Monegan and several top aides, the state fair episode was yet another example of a fixation that the governor and her husband, Todd, had with Trooper Wooten and the most granular details of his life. 'I thought to myself, "Man, do they have a heavy-duty network and focus on this guy," ' Mr. Monegan said. 'You'd call that an obsession.' "

Question: Does this become a big press story now?

CBS's Dean Reynolds peeled off the McCain campaign to spend some time with Obama, and here is his report:

"The national headquarters in Chicago airily dismisses complaints from journalists wondering why a schedule cannot be printed up or at least e-mailed in time to make coverage plans. Nor is there much sympathy for those of us who report for a newscast that airs in the early evening hours. Our shows place a premium on live reporting from the scene of campaign events. But this campaign can often be found in the air and flying around at the time the 'CBS Evening News with Katie Couric' is broadcast. I suspect there is a feeling within the Obama campaign that the broadcast networks are less influential in the age of the internet and thus needn't be accomodated as in the days of yore. Even if it's true, they are only hurting themselves by dissing audiences that run in the tens of millions every night.

"The McCain folks are more helpful and generally friendly. The schedules are printed on actual books you can hold in your hand, read, and then plan accordingly. The press aides are more knowledgeable and useful to us in the news media. The events are designed with a better eye, and for the simple needs of the press corps."

I actually liked the Obama plane. You get food every time you fly!

Instapundit isn't exactly sympathetic:

"It hasn't hurt the coverage, which is why they don't care. Plus this: 'The McCain campaign plane is better than Obama's, which is cramped, uncomfortable and smells terrible most of the time. Somehow the McCain folks manage to keep their charter clean, even where the press is seated.'

"Maybe that should be McCain's new schtick: If we can clean up after the press pool, we can clean up America!"

GOP strategist-turned-pundit Mike Murphy blows the whistle on a television practice:

"I was doing some cable TV duty last night and had the bad luck to follow a segment about a focus group of voters being dial tested during the debate. Dial groups are bad enough, but actually putting this madness on television as a verdict of some kind is reckless. I said as much at the beginning of my segment. First, the sample from one group is far too small to mean much. Second, turning this voodoo into a television spectacular completely distorts whatever limited research value a group might provide."

Kudos to Murphy for his candor. But it would have been more courageous if he'd said he was on MSNBC.