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Democrats anxious for Obama to widen lead
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Race
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| Contributor | Scott³ |
| Last Edited | Scott³ Aug 02, 2008 12:38pm |
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| Category | News |
| News Date | Friday, August 1, 2008 06:00:00 PM UTC0:0 |
| Description | Financial Times.
An excerpt...
"In 1980, Ronald Reagan asked voters whether they felt better off than four years earlier. He went on to defeat Jimmy Carter a few weeks later. On Friday Barack Obama raised the same question: “Do you think that you are better off now than you were four years ago or eight years ago?” he asked voters in Florida. “And if you don’t . . . do you think you can afford another four years of the same failed economic policies that we’ve had under George W. Bush?”
With unemployment on Friday jumping by 51,000 to take this year’s job losses to almost half a million, Mr Obama is mining a potentially rich seam. But a number of Democrats, including advisers to the Obama campaign, are worried that the Democratic party’s overall electoral advantage this year has not yet translated into comfortable leads for Mr Obama. On Friday Gallup showed Mr Obama just one point ahead of John McCain – a significant tightening in the past two weeks.
Mr McCain’s improving fortunes have coincided with a strikingly negative turn in his campaign’s tactics, with the launch last weekend of an advertisement criticising Mr Obama for failing to visit wounded soldiers when he was in Germany because the Pentagon refused to permit the media to accompany him. That allegation has since been debunked.
But the signs are that Mr McCain’s continuing attacks – most recently in a commercial that portrayed Mr Obama as a vapid celebrity against images of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears – may be striking a chord with the white working class voters who shunned Mr Obama so emphatically in many of his primary contests with Hillary Clinton.
With just one month to go before Labour Day – the traditional beginning of the general election – and only three weeks before the Democratic convention, many Democrats fear that time is running out for Mr Obama to overcome the suspicions of this key swing vote." |
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