Mccain is the loser in pennsylvania

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) -- Democrats in Pennsylvania are split between those who think the biggest disaster of the Bush presidency has been the Iraq war and those who think it's been his economic policies. The middle-class and blue-collar voters who feel every twitch of the economy right in their pocketbooks are backing Hillary Clinton, hoping that she can bring back the economy of her husband's presidency. Other Democrats, better educated and perhaps better insulated from immediate economic worries, are in Barack Obama's camp, inspired by his promise to change the way Washington works, especially how it deals with the rest of the world. The enthusiastic way Democrats trooped to the polls on Tuesday can't be good news for the Republicans, who'll send John McCain out in November to face the Democratic nominee, almost certainly Obama. The conventional wisdom , spun by the Clinton campaign and reinforced by opinion polls showing that a significant number of Clinton Democrats say McCain is their second choice, is that Obama can't win in November. The Democratic base of working-class whites will desert Obama, they say. If he can't win the primaries in big Democratic states -- California, New York, Ohio or Pennsylvania -- he can't beat McCain. The conventional wisdom, as it is so often, is wrong. The stars are aligning for a Democratic landslide in November. The economy, the war, and the general disgust with the Bush years are all moving in their direction, regardless of who the standard bearer is. While the Democrats have been squabbling among themselves, McCain got a bounce in the polls and has moved to solidify his party's base of conservatives. He's reaffirmed his support for the war and embraced the tax cuts he opposed in 2001, tying himself even closer to Bush's policies. In politics, six months can be a lifetime. But it's likely that McCain's support is peaking. Between now and November, the Democrats are likely to unite again, the economic news is likely to worsen, the violence in Iraq is likely to continue, and the spotlight will focus on McCain as it never has before. It's been buried by the coverage of the Clinton-Obama spat, but McCain has stumbled several times in the past weeks in potentially fatal ways. McCain, who's running as the expert in foreign policy, revealed just how shallow his expertise is when he repeatedly confused the two major groups in Islam, claiming that radical Shiite Iran was backing radical Sunni Al Qaeda in Iraq. It won't do, as his campaign now says, that Al Qaeda is simply short-hand for Muslims we don't like. Black is not short-hand for white, nor is right short-hand for wrong. One test of whether someone is qualified to be commander in chief is knowing who the enemy is. McCain has failed that test. On the economy, McCain put a serious dent in his reputation as a straight-talker, blatantly pandering to voters by proposing more tax cuts, even suggesting a moratorium on the federal gasoline tax. If McCain really believes global warming is a serious problem that must be addressed, he'd know that the price of gasoline is too low, not too high. McCain can't tell the truth about what it will take to reduce greenhouse gases. McCain's budget numbers just don't add up. He's gone from rejecting the first Bush tax cuts as being fiscally irresponsible to trying to out-Bush Bush. That may play well with the Republican hard-core base, but to moderate voters it looks like McCain thinks every economic problem can be cured with a tax cut, a theory that's proven its faults over the past seven years. While McCain backed into his party's nomination without even being forced to break a sweat, Clinton and Obama have honed their message and have mobilized a vast army of disgruntled Democrats. Come November, some of them will remember the nasty fight in March and April, and will cross the line to vote for McCain. Some will turn away from Obama because he's black, or from Clinton because she's a woman. But the vast majority will vote for the Democrat because they believe the times and their own best interests demand it. Copyright © 2008 MarketWatch.com

Published on Wednesday, April 23, 2008

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