|
Signs pointing to a McCain victory?
Steven Warshawsky, who sometimes comments at this site, has an article at American Thinker arguing that an Obama victory is not as certain as the media have been leading us to believe. For one thing, the media have been ignoring the remarkable phenomenon of Democrats who strongly oppose Obama and are supporting McCain. Many of these people are former Hillary Clinton supporters. Mr. Warshawsky, who lives on Manhattan’s ultra liberal Upper West Side, says that there is far less enthusiasm for the Democratic nominee this year than is usual for that neighborhood. I myself met one such Democrat yesterday, a lady who struck up a conversation with me in a restaurant when she saw me reading the New York Post and figured I would be on her side. She said she was very opposed to Obama and thought he’d be very bad for the country. She has been a Democrat all her life, has voted for the Democrat in every presidential election until this year. But she was upset by the way that Hillary Clinton was pushed aside, when the Democratic party bigwigs called for her to concede the contest and demanded that the super delegates commit themselves to Obama. When this happened, she began to look more critically at Obama, and was appalled by what she saw. Also, she agreed with me that if the media were doing their job, Obama would have been forced out of the race by his involvement with the hate-mongering Rev. Wright and Trinity Church. She did not sound like a Democrat at all, she sounded like a conservative, speaking with indignation about how the New York Times lies and covers up for Obama, and about how she can’t say anything critical about Obama in New York City because she will be personally attacked by liberals. She says liberals shut up anyone who departs from the Obama orthodoxy, that she’s never seen anything like it before, and that it upsets her. The phenomenon of which Steven Warshawsky speaks, Democrats for McCain, is real. But how does that add up to “signs pointing to a McCain victory” (the title of his article)? The polls show Obama with a consistent, solid lead, both nationwide and state by state. If there were a Democrats for McCain electorate out there sufficient to win McCain the election, wouldn’t it show up in the polls? Mr. Warshawsky does not suggest that the polls are dishonest or wrong, only that the Democrats for McCain have not received the coverage they deserve.
James P. writes:
Many of the “Democrats for McCain” are undoubtedly women. I have noticed over the years that female voters are particularly susceptible to the phenomenon of bandwagoning, i.e. voting for the party they think is going to win, regardless of any other issues or concerns. Back in 1992, I told a female friend I thought Clinton was going to win, and she immediately and eagerly responded, “So are you going to vote for him?” I said, of course NOT. I suspect that a lot of the “Democrats for McCain” will defect to the Obama ticket when they go to the voting booth, because they simply want to vote for the guy who is going to win.LA replies:
But is a single instance in which woman said this to you, proof of a general tendency of women to vote for the expected winner? It’s not something I’ve particularly noticed. It’s an interesting idea, but needs more facts to back it up.A. Zarkov writes:
I am originally from the Upper West Side of Manhattan. I was born, raised, educated and worked in NYC, and I’m familiar with the political culture of NYC, especially the Upper West Side. For more than the last 20 years I’ve lived in the San Francisco Bay area, and I’m pretty familiar with the political culture here to. I can offer my personal viewpoint on how the two areas compare. It’s actually worse here. The liberals here are more intolerant, and, on a personal basis, much nastier than their New York counterparts—especially in Berkeley, Oakland and San Francisco. Unlike NYC they won’t engage at all, preferring to remain in their own hermetic world free of any challenge to their ideas whatsoever. The effects of this attitude are both pernicious and widespread. For example, people in Berkeley find themselves practicing self censorship at all times, being careful to speak in codewords even in the most casual and intimate of conversations lest they disturb the peace with even the most innocent remark. Many people here aren’t even particularly liberal, but they don’t want to be ostracized and lonely, so they shut up and pretend. Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 25, 2008 01:07 PM | Send Email entry |