Why Obama Lost the 2008 Election by Phillip Ellis Jackson

August 6th, 2008

Ten reasons why Barack Obama will not win the 2008 presidential election — and none of them have anything to do with his middle name.

Yes, I know it’s only August, and only a simpleton or clairvoyant would offer a post-election analysis about how Barack Obama blew the 2008 presidential race.

Needless to say I’m not clairvoyant. The jury still seems to be out — at least in some people’s minds — about whether I’m a simpleton, though. But, I won’t use any innate foolishness I possess as the basis for offering a judgment about the outcome of an election that’s still three months away. Rather, I’m going to do what any good political analyst should do; analyze the present situation and offer a (hopefully) informed assessment well before the trends I detect become so manifestly obvious that everyone will claim they too “knew” the outcome months in advance.

So here’s my top ten list of reasons why John McCain, despite running one of the most turgid and uninspiring campaigns in modern electoral history, will succeed George W. Bush as the 44th President of the United States.

Reason #10: Racist white voters will not support Obama

No, this isn’t a condemnation of white, Southern, toothless, gun-toting Republicans. It’s an observation about the rank and file of the Democrat party. Whether it’s angry older white women who feel that the election was stolen from Hillary by an upstart younger black man, or just your average Joe Six Pack union worker who made it clear in the Democrat primaries that Bill Clinton was speaking for him when he floated his racist trial balloons on Hillary’s behalf, the so-called party of the average guy has repeatedly shown its true colors; pure white, not half-white.

This shouldn’t be much of a surprise. A former Grand Dragon of the Klu Klux Klan is now the respected Dean of the Senate Democrats. Any effort to break the cycle of black poverty and illiteracy through welfare reform and school vouchers has been repeatedly opposed by Democrat party officials who prefer their constituency to be completely dependent on the largess of their white elected leaders, rather than even the tiniest bit self-sufficient. Even Democrat fellow travelers like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton are less interested in bridging the divide between blacks and whites than they are in filling their own pockets with money from guilty white liberals and blackmailed corporations. Al Gore may have invented the carbon credit scam where his companies profit by selling hypothetical indulgences to hypocritical environmentalists who want everyone but themselves to change their lifestyles, but he doesn’t hold a candle to the organized race-for-hire politics of Jackson and Sharpton. The Democrat party is about preserving racial politics, not ending it, so it comes as little surprise that those who live by that sword may also die, at least metaphorically, by that same sword.

Take away the small cadres of limousine liberals and idealistic youth who will vote for Obama to assuage their guilt over being born wealthy and white, or just think it would be really, really cool to have a Black Guy in the White House even though it’s not all about skin color, and you have the naked face of race-based politics rearing its head in the Democrat party. The “Bradley Effect” is alive and well among Democrat voters, so named because they have a distinctive habit of lying to pollsters about their support for black candidates, only to act differently on election day. When their decisions actually count, all their progressive, liberal pabulum goes out the window as they reach for the lever and vote for the white guy like they did repeatedly in California, Chicago, New York and other cities. It’s why Obama needs to be 10-12 points ahead of McCain in the battleground states on November 4 — not statistically tied like he is today — or he’ll end up losing the election by double digits.

Reason #9: Europe loves Obama

Fresh off his triumphant tour of the Middle East and Europe, where he found time to exercise at the Ritz but not visit wounded American soldiers, Obama held a rally in Berlin and a lovefest in France to show the world that he is the better man for the job of President of the United States.

Actually, it wasn’t so much the presidency of the US that Barack was auditioning for, but Chief “Citizen of the World,” to cite from his own speech.

Unfortunately for Obama, as more than one commentator has pointed out, Germany, France, Russia, China, Pakistan and other nations that he aspires to impress don’t have any electoral votes in the upcoming
election.

The McCain campaign’s effective mocking of Obama’s celebutard status — comparing public acclaim for Brittany Spears and Paris Hilton to his 200,000 Berlin groupies — only reinforces the point that Michael Medved made during one of his broadcasts. To paraphrase that observation, “Remembering back to the last time this occurred, there’s something a little disturbing about 200,000 Germans chanting their support for a charismatic leader in the streets of Berlin.”

It’s no mystery to anyone, other than the mainstream press, why the Obama Magical Mystery Tour failed to elevate him in the polls back in the US, even after the President of France gushed shamelessly over “Dear Barack” during his recent visit to Paris. Americans by and large dislike the amoral, appeasing, self-interested and shallow Europeans (or Euro-weenies in today’s vernacular), and aren’t particularly interested in emulating their lifestyle or adopting their values. Paris is a beautiful city and a wonderful place to visit, as is London, Rome, and the rest of Europe. But just because one likes French food or admires Italian architecture doesn’t mean that we want these yahoos telling us how to live our lives and whom to vote for.

Besides, what “Europe thinks” isn’t particularly noteworthy in and of itself, particularly when it comes to assessing life in the United States. Despite what the European rabble dislike about the US, and despite what our own press tells us the governments of Europe dislike about the US, the facts on the ground tell a different story. The trend in Europe since the Iraq war in France, Germany and Italy has been to throw the anti-US governments out of office and replace them with friendlier pro-American governments. As far as the people themselves of these countries are concerned, we can take our cues from sources other than Berlin rock concert attendees and disgruntled Muslim protesters marching through the streets of London. These same people who allegedly hate us will like us just fine — regardless of who our president is — when they need the US to pull their chestnuts from the fire as we’ve done so many times in the past.

Reason #8: The press loves Obama

Twenty to thirty years ago, when the Internet was but a dream in Al Gore’s fertile mind, cable TV was still in its infancy, and all the news was controlled by the Big Three TV networks and The New York Times, this Obama press mania would have been a problem.

Well, maybe. Somehow, despite the mainstream press’ antipathy for Nixon in 1968 and 1972, and Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, “the wrong guy” still managed to get elected. Today, with the media monopoly all but gone and the influence of these opinion-shapers visibly diminished, it makes it even harder for the liberal press to control the agenda. Whether it’s fake Bush military records being exposed by an Internet blogger, the declining circulation of most major newspapers, or the utter irrelevancy of former giants like CBS News, the public is no longer required to accept the Pravda-like party line about evil (or stupid) Republicans and courageous, progressive Democrats. In fact, if it wasn’t for the alternative media that publicizes their reporting to show how silly and superficial it is, many people today wouldn’t even know what the New York Times said, or hear the latest inanity coming from the mouths of Katie Couric or Matt Lauer.

Americans have always had a built-in resistance to the elite, privileged class telling them what to do and how to think. When the mainstream press universally describes the election of the presumptive Democrat nominee in inevitable terms, the country’s collective bulls*it meter goes full tilt. Because we have conservative talk radio today to help set the record straight, and independent news sources like Fox News and The Drudge Report to give us the other side of the story, we no longer need to be afraid that our opinions are out of the mainstream. Instead, many people have come to understand that it is the mainstream media that is non-representative of majority thought, and as such anything the MSM says is now more likely to be filtered through a prism of fact checks and bias-alerts instead of being accepted unabashedly.

In short, the more the mainstream press tells us there is only one conclusion to reach, the more we all feel compelled to seek and do the opposite. All of which is bad news for “The Anointed One.”

Reason #7: Gas is $4/gallon

Never mind that it costs more to fill up the average car in Europe than it does in America. Americans don’t want to drive a golf cart with an AM-FM radio like they do in London, or squeeze themselves into a tin can on wheels like they do in Paris, Berlin and Rome. We’re not looking to justify $9/gallon gas by riding in a cardboard box that gets 40miles/gallon, so that the cost of filling up a mini-Cooper in Europe is equivalent to filling up your SUV in America. This is America, and we don’t give a rat’s rear end what they do in Europe and why they do it. If it makes sense on its own merits we’ll adopt it — and undoubtedly improve on it. If it can’t pass the common sense test, then no amount of high-minded preaching by the self-appointed elite will turn a bad idea into a good one.

And while we’re on the subject, let’s not forget the hypocrisy of Al Gore and other liberals who decry the high price of gasoline as a failure of the Bush administration; all of whom have been advocating $4/gallon gas for years in an effort to force Americans to abandon their cars and turn to mass transit. Trains and busses are great in a place like New York City, which is a densely populated island the size of DFW Airport. But in Texas, Wyoming, Arizona, or even a lot of the East Coast itself, mass transit is impractical. On occasion, and for specific tasks like commuting to work in an urban environment, mass transit may be great. But in a nation the size of the United States with a lot of distance between points even when it’s a “local” drive, we still need our cars. Paying four bucks a gallon is nuts when we have plenty of domestic oil reserves that are off limits thanks to our Democrat friends in Congress, regardless of how good it will be for “the planet” in Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi’s distorted view of reality.

One day we’ll all be driving solar powered wind mobiles, and the cost of a barrel of oil will no longer be an issue. (Actually, one day our great-grandchildren will be doing this, since new technologies don’t arise with the snap of a finger because Nancy Pelosi wants to demagogue the issue.) But until then we need oil; and not just a three-day supply from the Strategic Oil Reserve. Or, a nation-wide program to check the air pressure in our tires as Obama suggested, and thus supposedly alleviate the need for any further drilling.

There’s plenty of oil in ANWR that’s off limits because Democrats don’t want to risk potentially spoiling a pristine, 80-below-zero landscape the size of a few football fields. They’d rather have you pay through the nose to fill up your gas tank, and hopefully be pissed off enough at Bush to not elect John McCain. But as one person on the street said in a recent TV interview after she was shown an actual picture of ANWR while filling up her gas tank, if drilling there will threaten the local wildlife, then put all the animals in a zoo and pump the oil so my gasoline bill will be lower! The same goes for drilling offshore the US coast. China is going to drill 60 miles from the US coastline on behalf of Cuba while Nancy Pelosi “protects the planet” by preventing the US from developing these same oil fields, so we can buy this oil at a premium from the Chinese.

People aren’t stupid. They may be lazy and ill-informed at times, and willing to save the environment when the cost to them is $2.15 a gallon of gas instead of $2.05. But crank that cost up to $100 a tank-full, and you can almost hear their collective cry of “screw the polar bears!” Obama and the Democrats have turned a deaf ear to this outrage, lamenting only that the price of gas went up “too fast”, instead of “too high.”
Economic issues will drive the 2008 election. However, the people will not blame Bush and McCain for their misery, but rather Obama and Pelosi who have done absolutely nothing to alleviate the pain.

Reason #6: We’re winning the war in Iraq

There’s only one problem with declaring the surge to be a failure before the first new troops landed in Iraq; declaring a civil war to exist in a country that has reconciled many of its ethnic and religious tensions; and advocating an immediate withdraw because the “war is lost” when all indications point to the fact that the bad guys have been essentially defeated: you look like an idiot when you try to tell the American people that you were either (a) right all along despite the fact that you were obviously mistaken, or (b) never really said what the videotape actually shows you saying as you try out your latest round of “what I really meant by saying the surge wouldn’t work” explanations.

As George Patton once said during another time of war, Americans love a winner. The Democrats and their allies in the press have been trying to persuade the country for the last six years that Iraq is another Vietnam. It isn’t, and never was. Obama won his party’s nomination by asserting that he was always against the war, that he’d pull our soldiers out of Iraq regardless of the facts on the ground, and that he’d talk to dictators and enemies of the US without preconditions.

Well, a funny thing happened as events in Iraq improved following
the surge. Americans began to once again support the war effort in increasing numbers. Many of the formerly dissatisfied — like myself — weren’t advocating withdrawal as the media wanted to interpret our unhappiness. We wanted to escalate our involvement to bring it to a successful conclusion. Even during the darkest days in Iraq the country wasn’t clamoring for a Vietnam-like exodus with
helicopters hovering over the rooftops of downtown Bagdad. We wanted to stay and fight, and win!

Finally, more than a few Americans see little reason to sit down and chat with the leaders of Iran, Al Queda, or any other people who hate us, particularly if there is nothing immediate to be gained. We recognize that not all people share western values, and some people cannot be trusted. Better to have these petty despots fear us than admire us for our willingness to drop by for tea and cookies.

Obama aspires to be the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the United States. Most people in this country appreciate the very real threats that exist in the world today, and are more than a little uncomfortable with his dangerous naïveté when it comes to assuming that mantle of authority.

Reason #5: Obama’s friends and supporters

Reverend Wright, Louis Farrakhan, William Ayers, Ludacris, and Tony Rezko. Any one of these associations would have sent the media into a death-watch feeding frenzy if they were even indirectly linked to the Republican Party nominee.

And yet, while the press continues to make excuses for Obama, the American people are starting to take a long hard look at the man about whom the terrorist group Hamas said, “We like Mr. Obama, and we hope that he will win the election.”

In the real world you are known by both your friends and your enemies. In Obama’s case, his friends seem to have several things in common with America’s enemy Hamas: from damning America for its policies and actions, to spewing race- or religious-based hatred, to blowing up government property and killing innocent civilians, to saying stupid and idiotic things in support of his candidacy, to simply being a crook.

With friends like these, Obama doesn’t need any enemies.

Reason #4: 57 States, and counting

Every candidate makes gaffs. Some mangle their words. Others momentarily conjoin similar sounding words (Iran/Iraq). Some even put an “e” at the end of “potato.” Thank God I have spell check on my computer.

If you’re a Republican, this means you’re an idiot. Bush (take your pick — 41 or 43) can’t complete a coherent sentence. Dan Quayle was, and still is, a national laughing stock for his famous misspelling. But Barack Obama can speak about a “bomb” that fell on Pearl Harbor (confusing it with Nagasaki), think he’ll be President for “eight to ten years,” or most famously of all lament that he hasn’t yet visited “all 57 states” and, well, we’re supposed to understand that the guy was tired or having an off day, so give him a break.

The painful fact is that, like the anchors who report the mainstream news, Obama is a good reader and public speaker. Give him a teleprompter with a prepared script by one of his many speechwriters, and the man can turn a captivating phrase. But give him a microphone in an unscripted setting, and he’s as dumb as the proverbial box of rocks.

We can accept personal flaws — and even the occasional peccadillo — in our leaders. But we can’t accept outright stupidity. It’s the reason the nuclear peanut farmer Jimmy Carter lost to the B-movie actor Ronald Reagan. The press in 1980 had little love for the supposedly mentally challenged movie actor who won the Republican Party nomination. But as it turned out, the American people saw that Reagan was no dummy. And even more to the point, they had absolutely no love for retaining the professed super smart White House incumbent who gave us long lines and gasoline rationing, hyper-inflation, American civilians held hostage in Iran, a “national malaise” blamed on the American public, and the boycott of the Moscow Olympics as a substitute for any coherent foreign policy.

Obama is a train wreck waiting to happen, from his tax-happy
domestic proposals to his third-grade grasp of international relations. McCain’s recent ad showing him as just another media-created celebutard has resonated with the public because, like so many things that tend to hit home, in addition to being witty and funny, it has the added advantage of being true.

Reason #3: One Messiah is enough for most people

There’s something disturbing about a person who equates his inevitable ascendency to the Office of President of the United States with shimmering light, epiphanies of the spirit, and a command over the world’s oceans.

Now, no one seriously believes that Barack Obama seriously believes that he is the actual messiah. But most people who don’t believe they are the product of the Second Coming avoid speaking about themselves in messianic terms, and therein lies the problem. Whether it’s the serial fainters at his rallies being handed the serial water bottles to revive them, the religious-like metaphors he embraces to talk about a new beginning for all mankind that will arise from his election to office, or the just plain creepy way a number of his supporters liken him to a biblical figure, none of this wears well with the majority of the American public.

We’ve been conditioned by decades of liberal-speak to automatically avoid anyone who wants to mix politics and religion. Google “Obamassiah” and you get a few hundred thousand hits. Google “McCainassiah” and it asks you if you actually meant a different word.

Obama runs the very great risk of alienating the voting public by mixing the presumed inevitability of his election with the pseudo-religious undertones he creates through his own words and actions. Americans don’t want to elect a pope any more than they want to elect a king.

Reason #2: There’s no there, there

Exactly what the hell is “change,” except the coins I get back after giving the coffee shop attendant five bucks for my $3.95 frappuccino?

There are only so many times a candidate can repeat a platitude like “change” before the voting public will eventually require him to define what he means. The problem is, every time Obama tries to put some flesh on his pronouncements he runs into trouble, like he did recently with his on again/off again support for an undivided Jerusalem. After being raked over the coals by Jews and Arabs alike for his equivocal statements, Obama fell back on his best Rodney King impersonation and answered all further questions with his own version of can’t we all just get along? That may work well in Hollywood or the vacuousness of TV news, but Americans normally demand a bit more than empty rhetoric and slogans from their prospective leaders.

Reason #1: 2012

If Obama wins the 2008 election, he’ll undoubtedly run for re-election in 2012. That means Hillary will have to wait until 2016 to make another run for the White House. She’ll be 70 years old — or just two years younger than John McCain is today.

If the Clintons have any desire to return to power, and make no mistake about it power is the only thing the Clintons care about, then Barack Obama cannot be allowed to win. Therefore, except for the surface-only gestures to aid Obama in his presidential quest, Hillary will do nothing to soothe the hurt feelings of all those disenfranchised women invested in her candidacy. Neither will she sing Barack’s praises to the racist Democrat voters who might give Obama a fresh look if she earnestly supported his candidacy. In fact, expect the race-bating whisper campaign to continue that Bill Clinton made famous throughout the Democrat primary process. (All this presumes, of course, that Bill really wants his wife in the Oval Office looking each day at the alcove he and Monica squeezed into when the former President was experimenting with a new use for his cigars, and won’t play a double game himself to sabotage Hillary’s prospects.)

A McCain victory in 2008 not only puts Hillary back in the game in 2012, it gives her “I told you so” bragging rights to help lock up the nomination. The only thing standing between Hillary and the White House is Barack Obama. And that is a very dangerous position to occupy, as the literal and figurative bodies of all former Clinton opponents can testify.

McCain wins in November

Put these ten reasons together, and I contend that even an inept campaign by the current Republican nominee can capture the White House.

The only thing stopping a McCain victory now is an unlikely decision in Denver to take the nomination away from Obama and give it to Hillary. That, of course, could theoretically help Hillary gain the Oval Office, but it would eviscerate the Democrat party in the process. Obama could be 20 points behind McCain at the time of their convention and any decision to treat him like a normal candidate — that is, take away his nomination (think Robert Toricelli in 2002 or Thomas Eagleton in 1972) — would be decried as “racist,” and throw the Democrat party into chaos.

So, even the worst case scenario still has a silver lining.

Elections & Political Parties

Phillip Ellis Jackson has a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. In addition to his teaching and political experience, he has worked in the private and non-profit sectors. He is the author of several novels with cultural and political themes.Jackson-ic@hotmail.comhttp://www.scifi-jackson.com/

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