A faltering campaign?

[fpb]

So far, McCain supporters have been greatly disappointed by his performance against Obama. I will, personally, wait and see until the vote, and then decide whether the man who managed to completely defeat the Republican Party establishment practically without any starting means could not find a way around his current opponent. However, there is one thing I know for sure: the strategy that a loud chorus of conservative pundits are calling for - hound the steps of the young Obama for evidence of political extremism and what they call "socialism" - is bound to fail. I do not know what these gentlemen's life experience is, but in that of most of us, a certain amount of more or less reflexive student-union leftishness is practically inevitable. Everyone who has been at college has had Communist friends and maybe an anarchist acquaintance or few, had a favourite professor who was a Socialist theorist, or an aggressive race-theorist acquaintance. You cannot scare a modern public with what Obama did or said twenty years ago; not when the man - apart from his abortion proposals - is offering a program that is really further to the right (as kennahijja has pointed out) than the standard of a perfectly democratic left party in most Western countries. There probably is more to be got out of his connection with the Daley machine and with Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; Americans and electors in general still dislike party machines, corrupt politicians, and connections between politics and big business.

Comments

[stigandnasty919.livejournal.com]

On donations, I think that is quite true.

I find myself caring very little about this election. Less so than previous American elections. Part of that is that the difference between the parties is less than usual. McCain is probably the most acceptable Republican to a woolly liberals like myself and Obama is, in my view at least, more style than substance.

Unlike yourself, however, I am disturbed about Palin.

I did ask myself if I ought to be concerned at the American election, it is a foreign country after all, what right do I have to comment - but what happens in America does impact on the rest of the world in direct ways.

The impact on Northern Ireland has been fairly major in the past - for good and for bad and the financial crisis had its beginnings in the USA.