Campaign Trail 2008 »

• Dick Morris predicts Obama’s rise and fall

  October 7, 2008 @ 4:39 pm | by Denis Staunton

  In Nashville for tonight’s presidential debate, I’ve just come back from a discussion where Dick Morris, the conservative political commentator and former advisor to Bill Clinton, gazed into his political crystal ball. This is what he saw:

  Obama’s probably going to win. He’ll take with him a humungous Democratic majority in both houses – about 30 extra seats in the house and seven to 10 in the senate, maybe as many as 13 in the senate.
  But it’s going to be the gridlock of the grave, not against the opposition but against reality. You’re going to have so many demands on the federal treasury and such a limited ability to run a deficit because of the crisis of confidence in the economy and in our currency that the political establishment is going to be rendered essentially helpless.
  So it will not be the opposite party you have to deal with, this will be dire necessity you have to deal with and they will be essentially powerless.
  What’s going to happen is things are going to get worse and worse. Obama’s going to be hated in the United States. His ratings will go close to zero. People will look back to the halcyon days when we had Bush as president. Obama will get away for six or eight months with blaming Bush but that will wear increasingly thin.
  There’ll be a humungous Republican tide in 2010 which will now restore partisan gridlock…There’ll be a massive revolt against a terrible economy, against the inability to deliver on campaign promises and all of that. And then you’ll have a Republican congress and a Democratic president. And this is where I came in.

  To his credit, Morris reminded us that, a few months ago, he predicted that Hillary Clinton would win the Democratic nomination.

• Back to the day job

  October 1, 2008 @ 10:48 am | by Denis Staunton

  Barack Obama and John McCain will be back in Washington tonight to vote on the $700 billion financial rescue package in the Senate. They may need help finding their way around the Capitol because they’ve been there so seldom lately.

  McCain has missed 64 per cent of Senate votes since January 2007 – more than any other senator. Obama has missed 46 per cent of the votes, giving him the third worst attendance record. Apart from McCain, the only senator who has voted less often than Obama is Southa Dakota Democrat Tim Johnson, who was out of action for most of last year due to a brain aneurysm.

  Both Obama and McCain have been drawing their $169,300 annual salaries as senators while they’ve been campaigning and they retain their positions on powerful committees. A pro-McCain group Vets for Freedom this week started airing an ad attacking the failure of the sub-committee on European Affairs, which Obama chairs, for failing to hold a single hearing on the oversight of military operations in Afghanistan.

  

  One senator with more time to spend at her day job these days is Hillary Clinton. Here’s The Onion’s take on how she likes being back.

• McCain the loser as bailout collapses

  September 30, 2008 @ 9:30 am | by Denis Staunton

  The Obama and McCain campaigns traded recriminations after the House of Representatives rejected the $700 billion bail-out of Wall Street but the debacle on Capitol Hill is almost certainly more damaging to the Republican candidate.

  John McCain suspended his campaign last week to return to Washington, declaring that he was focusing his efforts on brokering a deal.

  He supported the compromise plan that went before the House on Monday and was so confident it would pass that he was taking credit for it before the vote was taken. In the event, two out of three Republicans rejected the deal, leaving McCain looking weak and irrelevant.

  Obama tried to stay out of the negotiations, only returning to Washington when President George Bush asked him to attend a White House meeting on the crisis last week. After the vote yesterday, the Democratic candidate urged calm, reassuring Americans that Congress would eventually come together to agree a rescue plan.

  The image of a dysfunctional system in Washington reinforces Obama’s message of change and undermines McCain’s argument that his legislative experience makes him a better choice as president.

  Talk of an imminent economic depression, which has dominated the airwaves in recent days, could also help Obama to win over white, blue-collar voters in the industrial states of Michigan, Ohio and Pennsylvania, where the Democrat is still struggling despite his recent poll boost elsewhere. Older white voters who supported Hillary Clinton have been slow to move behind Obama but the gloomy economic predictions could persuade many of them that taking a risk on change is a better option than voting for a continuation of Republican economic policies.

  House Republicans who voted against the rescue plan did so partly on account of ideological objections to such an expansion of government influence over the economy. But many were spooked into voting no by a deluge of letters, emails and phone calls opposing the bail-out, which has also been a target for attack on conservative talk radio.

  Republican leaders in the House blamed the bill’s failure on a speech by House speaker Nancy Pelosi during the debate, complaining that her partisan tone alienated wavering congressmen.

  Watch the speech yourself and see what you think.