If Obama Loses, Who Gets Blamed?

His loss would be disastrous for the media and political establishment.

By John Dickerson

If Barack Obama wins the election, it will be historic. And if he loses, it will be pretty historic, too: It would mark the biggest collective error in the history of the media and political establishment.



An Obama loss would mean the majority of pundits, reporters and analysts were wrong. Pollsters would have to find a new line of work, since Obama has been ahead in all 159 polls taken in the last six weeks. The massive crowds that have regularly turned out to see Obama would turn out to have meant nothing. This collective failure of elites would provide such a blast of schadenfreude that Republicans like Rush Limbaugh would be struck speechless (another historic first).

This situation lends a feeling of unreality to the proceedings as we begin to measure the time until Election Day in hours. It is the elephant on the campaign plane. No one is letting on. Journalists aren't supposed to. Plus, we've been wrong so often, and politics can be so unpredictable, it would be dumb to say that Obama is going to win big.

John McCain is still running hard, and Obama isn't doing any premature celebrating. Members of his staff are on a hair-trigger for any stories that might suggest he or they are displaying overconfidence. Aides said Obama was reacting to the apparent good news with trademark equilibrium though they did say he was happy to be at the end of his journey. "He's exhilarated," said David Axelrod. "He smells the finish line."

Despite Obama's even keel, there are a few small signs that suggest Obama is feeling good. He's flashing that magazine-cover smile, the one that takes over his face, a little more often. On the stump, where he's given nearly the exact same speech for a week, he's started to show some of the looseness of his earlier campaign. "Don't be hoodwinked," he said of McCain's claims, a standard line, to which he added a less regular filigree: "Don't be bamboozled, don't fall for the okey-doke."

In Columbus, Obama even gave a shout-out to McCain. Talking about the need to improve the political discourse, he said that also included the need for more humor. "John McCain was funny yesterday on Saturday Night Live," he said. "I didn't see it last night but I saw it on YouTube. That's what our politics should be about, the ability to laugh at ourselves."

Obama has had the most fun with Dick Cheney, who recently said he was "delighted" to endorse John McCain. "You've never seen Dick Cheney delighted, but he is," Obama told a crowd here, chucking to himself. "It's kinda hard to picture, but it's true." He went on to congratulate McCain. "He had to work hard for it!" The rain started pouring in the middle of his Cheney routine, but Obama didn't miss a beat. "Did you notice that it all started when I started talking about Dick Cheney? We've been through a nation of storms but sunshine is on the way."

In Cleveland, Bruce Springsteen opened for Obama. When he was finished, the Obama family joined him, and Springsteen brought up his wife Patty Scialfa and their three kids. Suddenly it was like we were all in the vestibule of a holiday party as The One and The Boss implored their children to step forward and shake the hands.

Share this article on DiggBuzz up!Share this article on BuzzWhen the rally in Cleveland concluded, Obama was drenched but lingered for a moment in front of the crowd, estimated at 80,000, and did a few tiny little dance steps to "Signed, Sealed, Delivered, I'm Yours," the Stevie Wonder song that plays after each rally the minute he stops speaking.

It's hard to guess at a candidate's inner feelings. It is particularly hard with Obama, whose emotions are as carefully constrained as a Bonsai tree and who keeps the press at a chilly distance. It could be that Obama is just happy to be with his family. Since Saturday, Obama's wife Michelle and children, Malia and Sasha, have been with him. The girls are clearly delighted to be in his company. At most stops, Michelle introduces her husband and implores the audience to help her husband finish the quest he started in their name 21 months ago. "I would love to give credit to my husband," she said, "but this race is not about him but all of us, all of you. He's taken us 85 percent of the way. The rest is on us."

Obama told the crowd in Cleveland that the family time is shaping his mood. "The last few days I've been feeling good," he said. "You start thinking that maybe we might win an election November 4."

Great: Now another American institution could be in peril: If Obama loses, we may have reason to doubt the power of family, too.

3 Tips to Choose the Best Credit Repair Service

By Link Robertson

Many credit repair services make it sound as if all you have to do is pay them and your credit report will be fixed. However this is not true, below is a criteria you should use when choosing a service.

Do Not Pay Large Fees

Many services will charge large upfront fees. Instead look for more standard rates such as $179 for a start up fee and then a monthly fee of $100 or less. Some services will charge per action, I do not suggest this as your fees can add up quickly to more than $100 / month.

Also you should avoid a company that says you must make a large upfront payment, these companies are typically not effective services and are looking to make a quick buck at your expense.

Look For Refunds Not Guarantees

Credit repair can not be guaranteed, esspecially upfront. This is similar to a defense attorney guaranteeing that you will be found innocent of a criminal charge - IT CAN NOT BE DONE

I strongly suggest you avoid any service that make a guarantee, instead look for a refund policy or warranty. Many good services will offer a refund if their service is ineffective or you are not satisfied.


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Leading in polls, Obama plays it safe

Refers to McCain as 'my opponent,' let's allies respond to sharp attacks

Alex Brandon / AP


Sen. Barack Obama at a rally at the Genoa Park and Amphitheater in Columbus, Ohio, on Friday.


COLUMBUS, Ohio - Leading in polls with 25 days to the election, Democrat Barack Obama is playing it safe, offering careful proposals to address the economic crisis while letting allies respond to John McCain's sharpest charges.

The Democratic presidential nominee, famous for his unscripted oratory, now reads his speeches from TelePrompTers, reducing the chance of gaffes. He has not held a news conference in two weeks, although he has done several one-on-one interviews with national and local reporters.

He now refers to Republican John McCain as "my opponent" more often than by name. And he offers carefully limited, comparatively non-controversial remedies for the nation's financial crisis.

Publicly, Obama's aides say he keeps a calm demeanor and measured tone because he doesn't want to fuel the anguish and panic caused by the economic meltdown. Privately, they acknowledge there is no desire to shake up a campaign dynamic that is inching him closer to the White House.

"I don't like to yell," Obama told more than 10,000 people in Columbus on Friday, his fifth large rally in hotly contested Ohio in two days. He was referring to a sound-system glitch, but it could have been a metaphor for his home-stretch strategy.

"He's responding just right, and the polls are reflecting it," said Sen. Sherrod Brown, D-Ohio, who campaigned with Obama this week and helped lead the counterattacks against McCain. When GOP vice presidential nominee Sarah Palin spoke in Ohio on Thursday, Brown said, she spent too much time on issues such as Obama's ties to Vietnam War-era radical William Ayers, now a college professor in Chicago.

"People are saying, 'What about our jobs, what about the banking situation?'" Brown said.

On Friday as McCain rolled out a new TV ad with his sharpest language yet about Ayers, the sharpest Democratic response came from Obama's running mate, Joe Biden, who told an audience in Springfield, Mo., that McCain is trying to "take the lowest road to the highest office in America."

Careful balance

Obama is seeking a careful balance these days. He criticizes details of McCain's chief economic proposals, and he briefly and broadly disputes Republican attacks on his character, not getting into details. That seems to satisfy Democratic stalwarts who feel recent nominees were too slow to respond to character attacks.

Obama devotes more time to explaining his own long-standing proposals for tax cuts and energy investments. On Friday, he added a temporary program of tax breaks, low-interest government and government-backed private loans for small businesses having trouble borrowing to meet payrolls, maintain inventories or expand.

When this careful rhetoric threatened to bore crowds seeking rhetorical fireworks and when the economic problems turned into a crisis, he added more upbeat lines to his stump speech.

"Now is not the time for fear," Obama said at every Ohio stop this week. "Now is the time for resolve and steady leadership."

Unless asked, he does not mention McCain's and Palin's fiercest line of attack: that he has associated with Ayers, a former 1960s radical who helped found the violent Weather Underground. When questioned on a radio talk show this week, Obama said that when he began working with Ayers on two nonprofit organization boards in Chicago a quarter century later he thought that the college professor, who lives in his neighborhood, had been rehabilitated.

Increasingly, high-profile supporters take the sharper jabs at McCain before Obama comes on stage. On a sunny street with a few thousand people in Chillicothe, Ohio, on Friday, Ohio Gov. Ted Strickland played the part.

"The McCain-Palin campaign and some of their followers unfortunately want you to be afraid of Barack Obama," he said, adding that "others" have spread untruths about the nominee.

The money mess Obama or McCain will inherit

The next president's domestic policy cake has already been baked.

The next president’s foreign policy and defense script has long since been written.

To simplify only slightly, it consists of winding down Iraq, declawing Iran and Hugo Chavez, and keeping Russia calm.

And now, after a scary and tumultuous fortnight of economic woes and corporate bailouts, his domestic narrative has also been outlined. And global credit markets, the Bush administration and Congress are holding the pen.



For the president-elect, this will consist largely of navigating the vast and bewildering new economic world order created by Henry Paulson and Ben Bernanke.

Unprecedented presidential inheritance

Of course, new administrations always deal with the consequences of the previous one, but this kind of thing has never happened.

Who is Henry Paulson?

Sept. 22: Fearing he wouldn't have much influence, Henry Paulson had to be talked into becoming Treasury Secretary two years ago. Now he's putting his stamp on the entire global economy. NBC's Pete Williams reports.

Imagine if Herbert Hoover had constructed the New Deal just before turning it over to Franklin Roosevelt. Or if James Buchanan had declared war on the South before Abe Lincoln took the oath.

No wonder Barack Obama has said that, if he wins, he’ll keep Paulson in power at least through the transition. Obama will need the treasury secretary to explain this new system he’s supposed to run.

Indeed, Paulson has been on the phone almost every day with both Obama and John McCain.

It’s more than a courtesy. In a sense, a new administration already is in office. These days, George W. Bush rarely emerges from the West Wing.

The new economic machine
And what is the new machine that Obama or McCain will inherit?

Think of it as the world’s largest government-run “sovereign wealth fund.”

Economic decision-making in America is now fully in the hands of bureaucrats. And they don’t have the independent power Americans once had.

While no one can go it alone in a globalized world, we have lost the power acquired — and ultimately abused — after World War II to set the terms of trade.

Until recently, we could afford to make fun of Brussels. Now we are Brussels, with its hive of bureaucrats. Ours is located in Washington.

New York — the city of Alexander Hamilton, J.P. Morgan and the Rockefellers — has now ceased to be the capitol of capital.

What it means for the president-elect

Our greed, folly and ineptitude are to blame. So is a willful refusal to acknowledge that there is no free lunch and that what goes up must come down. We have officially ruined what it took us a hundred years to build: the credibility of Wall Street and dollar-centric commerce.

This is the reality that Obama or McCain will have to deal with.

That means higher taxes, lower spending and a scaling back of grand plans. It means a new realism and a long slog into the future.

The main task of the next president is already set. He’s got to make the act of digging out sound exciting. We’ve done it before. All it takes is leadership.

Another Lincoln or FDR will do.

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Nielsen: Almost 40 million watch Obama speech

CHICAGO (MarketWatch) -- Almost 40 million people watched Sen. Barack Obama's acceptance of the Democratic presidential nomination on Thursday night, according to Nielsen Media Research. That figure, which includes both broadcast and cable networks, is nearly twice the four-day average of the 2004 Democratic National Convention. And with 7.6 million black viewers, the event was the fifth most-watched nonsports program among African-Americans in 11 years, Nielsen added.




AWESOME!!!

Obama Casts McCain as Rich, Out of Touch

RICHMOND, Va. – Democrat Barack Obama Thursday depicted John McCain as rich, out of touch and less a foreign-policy expert than he claims — part of the increasingly negative tone of the presidential hopeful's message as he tries to fight the perception that his campaign has stalled.

Two national polls released Wednesday showed McCain has drawn almost even with Obama in the last few weeks, thanks to an aggressive new tone and a series of negative campaign commercials painting Obama as a tax raiser who is ill-prepared to lead in a dangerous world. That, in turn, has prompted Obama to step up his rhetoric against McCain.



Both an NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll and a CBS News/New York Times survey found the race close — Obama with 45 percent to 42 percent for McCain.

At a town-hall meeting here, Obama was introduced by Virginia Gov. Tim Kaine, widely believed to be on Obama's short list of possible vice presidential contenders. The two met privately for about 15 minutes before the campaign appearance. Kaine later batted away questions about his prospects.

"I'm going to let the campaign speak for the campaign," he said.

Speaking to supporters, Obama chided McCain for an interview he gave to the Politico Web site where he said he didn't know how many homes he owns. McCain's wife, Cindy, is an heiress to a large beer distributorship whose wealth is estimated to be at least $100 million.

"If you're like me, and you've got one house, or you are like the millions of people who are struggling right now to keep up with their mortgage so they don't lose their home, you might have a different perspective," Obama said.

Read the rest of the article:

Obama proposes $7K credit for fuel-efficient cars

Automotive News

LANSING, Mich. (Reuters) -- Barack Obama proposed tapping the strategic oil reserve on Monday to help lower gas prices, reversing an earlier stance, and called rival John McCain a tool of big oil companies as rising energy costs took center stage in the U.S. presidential campaign.



In a speech assessing the country's energy future, Obama called for a $7,000 tax credit to help consumers buy fuel-efficient cars, set a goal of 1 million plug-in hybrid cars on U.S. roads by 2015 and proposed a requirement that 10 percent of U.S. energy comes from renewable sources by the end of his first term.

Obama, celebrating his 47th birthday, also unveiled a package of steps designed to end U.S. reliance on oil imports from the Middle East and Venezuela within 10 years, including tax credits for buyers of fuel-efficient hybrid cars.

In a speech in Michigan, a battleground in November's White House election and home to the struggling U.S. auto industry, he proposed releasing 70 million barrels of light oil, easier to refine into gasoline, from the emergency U.S. stockpile.

The Democratic senator from Illinois said the light oil could be replaced later with heavier crude in a swap designed to bring quick relief from high gasoline prices.

"We have to make a serious, nationwide commitment to developing new sources of energy and we have to do it right away," Obama said.

McCain fired back in Pennsylvania, criticizing Obama's opposition to nuclear power and offshore drilling and calling on Congress and Obama to return to Washington from their summer break to try to solve the country's energy challenges.

"Anybody who says that we can achieve energy independence without using and increasing these existing energy resources either doesn't have the experience to meet the challenges we face or isn't giving the American people straight talk," McCain said in Lafayette Hill, a suburb of Philadelphia.

The Obama campaign responded with a challenge.

"If Senator McCain is willing to pass a compromise that provides immediate relief to consumers in the form of a $1,000 energy rebate and makes a serious investment in renewable energy, Senator Obama would be happy to join him in calling on Congress to return," said Obama spokesman Bill Burton.

"But if he continues to reject any compromise that takes away tax breaks for the same oil companies that have given millions to his campaign ... we'd rather not waste the American people's tax dollars,"

Two daily tracking polls show McCain, a Republican senator from Arizona, has in the past week wiped out Obama's narrow national lead in the campaign for the Nov. 4 election.

The faltering U.S. economy, including rising gas prices, rank as the top issue for American voters in most polls.

AD SAYS MCCAIN 'IN OIL'S POCKET'

Obama's new television advertisement said McCain was "in the pocket" of oil companies. The ad pictured McCain standing with President George W. Bush. "After one president in the pocket of Big Oil -- we can't afford another," it says.

The McCain camp said the ad failed to mention McCain opposed a 2005 energy bill that provided billions in tax breaks for energy producers, including oil companies. Obama voted for the bill, which was backed by the Republican president.

The McCain campaign also blasted Obama's proposal on the strategic oil reserve, noting he said just weeks ago that it should be used only for genuine emergencies.

"Tapping the strategic oil reserve is not a substitute for a real plan to increase supply through additional drilling and nuclear power," McCain spokesman Tucker Bounds said.

"The last release of oil from the strategic reserve came in response to Hurricane Katrina, but the only crisis that has developed since Barack Obama last rejected this idea two months ago is a slide in his poll numbers," he said.

Obama's reversal on tapping the emergency oil stockpile is his second shift on energy issues in recent days.

On Friday he dropped his blanket opposition to offshore oil drilling and signaled he would be open to limited drilling as part of a compromise energy package in Congress aimed at reining in prices.

But Obama said in Michigan that oil companies should first focus on drilling on 68 million acres to which they have access but have not touched.

McCain has called for opening new areas of U.S. coastline to offshore oil drilling, which polls show is supported by a majority of Americans, and nuclear power. McCain plans a visit to a nuclear power plant on Tuesday.

In Michigan, Obama also pushed his proposal for a windfall tax on the soaring profits of big oil firms, which will pay for a $1,000 tax rebate for low- and middle-income families.

Original article published in Automotive News. CLICK HERE to view.

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