The Palin Gimmick Wears Out

Now that the Palin gimmick and accompanying hysteria have worn off, voters are beginning to show their presidential preference based on the campaign’s critical issues, especially the economy.

[Election 2008]


Senator John McCain’s stock is dropping like the share price of Merrill Lynch while Senator Barack Obama’s is rising.


After the Democratic Convention, Senator Obama had a seven to eight points leap in the polls; the lead was wiped out after the Republicans’ Convention, when Senator McCain, in a Hail Mary type desperate move, picked Alaska governor, the eminently unqualified Sarah Palin, to be his VP running mate.

Some in media even momentarily suspended their intelligence for a few days –despite the danger the nation would face of risking Palin becoming president and controlling national security—and hopped on the band wagon.

Now that the Palin gimmick and accompanying hysteria have worn off, voters are beginning to show their presidential preference based on the campaign’s critical issues, especially the economy.

Obama is back on top according to all the major polls and a New York Times survey published yesterday shows that among registered voters Obama had an overall lead of 48% to 43%.

Also when asked whom they believed will win in November, voters went by an overwhelming margin of 45% to 38%.

The collapse on Wall Street– with a major firm like Lehman Brothers going belly up, Merrill Lynch disappearing in a basement sale, and American International Group (AIG) being nationalized by the government—has placed the nation’s economic woes squarely back on the national front pages.

While Obama has been outlining for months now his vision to spur economic recovery –$50 billion program to create new jobs rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure—McCain confessed weeks ago that he knows nothing about the economy.

McCain’s ignorance is showing.

On Monday, even as thousands of Americans were cleaning their desks on Wall Street, McCain said the nation’s ‘economy is fundamentally sound.’

The very next day, McCain tried to slide out of the corner he had backed himself into by claiming that he had been referring to American workers ‘as the most hard working’ people in the world. This was of course a preposterous lie.

Why would he be stating the obvious? We all know that American workers may be some of the hardest working people in the world, but what’s that got to do with the economic crisis?

McCain then took another wild guess. He declared that he would oppose any government plan to bail out AIG, even as it tottered towards collapse. The Bush Administration promptly ignored McCain and pumped $85 billion into AIG. The Bush folks, unlike McCain, knew that AIG’s collapse would unleash a domino effect that would send people running to their banks and induce the kind of collapse the nation suffered in 1929.

McCain has been morphing on a daily basis and voters are beginning to see this.

He had derided Obama for being inexperienced to be president of the United States. Then when Obama selected the wise and experienced Joe Biden as his running mate, McCain panicked and picked Palin.

Suddenly, he was now the candidate of ‘change.’ McCain said he and Palin were the best team that would be able to deliver change to Washington.

It’s a tough lie for the McCain-Palin team to sell and voters aren’t buying it.

The New York Times survey showed that 65% of those polled believed that Obama ‘would bring about change in the way things are done in Washington’ while only 37% said the same about McCain.

The Alaskan pitbull’s lipstick is wearing out and the ‘maverick’ is being exposed as an opportunistic politician.

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