Sabato: McSame Looking Like Adlai Stevenson

By: The Grey Havens
Published On: 7/21/2008 8:07:30 PM

Since he clinched the nomination,  polls have shown Obama with a significant and growing lead in the race for the White House.  Many of us have been arguing that these numbers show an electoral floor for Obama and a ceiling for McSame, and none other than Virginia's most quoted political scientist, UVA's Larry Sabato, has come to much the same conclusion.

Presenting the evidence along with Emory University's Alan Abramowitz and Thomas Mann from Brookings, Sabato looks at the trends and structural makeup of this election and concludes:

Barack Obama is not a national hero like Dwight Eisenhower, and George Bush is certainly no Harry Truman. But if history is any guide, and absent a dramatic change in election fundamentals or an utter collapse of the Obama candidacy, John McCain is likely to suffer the same fate as Adlai Stevenson.

To get a sense of the gravity of this statement, understand that Eisenhower destroyed Stevenson, absolutely mopped the floor with him:

In the 1952 presidential election against Dwight D. Eisenhower, Stevenson lost heavily outside the Solid South; he won only nine states and lost the Electoral College vote 442 to 89.

Ouch! Its enough to make the dispirited and depressed Republicans throw up their hands and just start saying things like "We're F**ked".  Yeah, they're doing that already.

Read the detailed analysis here, and just take a look at Obama's history-making trip and the return of American greatness to the world stage here.

Oh, and McSame is "bleeding red ink".  Pitiful.

Comments



It is just desperation on the McSame side (KathyinBlacksburg - 7/22/2008 10:43:21 AM)
They are so pathetic that they are now blaming it on the pretense that McCain doesn't get fair coverage.  First, the lopsided coverage (not that their guy is imploding from his own stupidity) was when there was still a primary and after when there were questions about the level of Clinton support for Barack.  That made the Democratic side more newsworthy.  Besides, McSame had benefited from an early primary season win and the McCain media-love fest was everywhere.  It still exists.  The number of stories has nothing whatever to do with the slant of the coverage.  Note CNN cited the peak of the Clinton-Obama tensions to have it tip to 70-50 stories (Dem. GOP candidate).

Over at MSNBC 70% of the 130,000 plus who voted in the poll (unscientific though it is) voted that McCain is getting a raw deal.  In their dreams.  It just shows how the radical right has succeeded in getting folks to actually believe this stuff.  The email you cite ("We're XXXXXX" in this story hasn't made it around the "main" news outlets, except for Olbermann (and perhaps Abrams (not sure, but I think he also mentioned it).  What has made it is CBS framing Barack's visit from the McCain point of view and frame.  I'm posting a piece on that in a bit.