Wall Street Journal's reporter / analyst Jonathan Weisman gives us the poop on the current state of play (as of October 14-18: note that a spread of 5 days for an opinion survey in the USA skewers the result; it's bad polling, but in this case nevertheless probably the best around). I saw the Fox News' commentator Liberal millionaire leftist Alan Coomes just poo-poo any poll that doesn't reflect his own predilections, claiming that the Republicans lead only in "battleground states," whereas everywhere else his Democrats are leading and will prevail, the extreme leftist maintains. Maybe he's correct about the current trend, just two weeks before most voters get out to the polling places.
However, the battleground state of Ohio puts the lie to the ministrations of the Coomes hypothesis. It went for Obama by a huge majority, it's an industrial state suffering for some years from radical de-industrialization and unbearably h+ unemployment. Obama has abandoned his role as Prez to spend weeks out of office (but I doubt he'll return a proper proporation of his pay cheque), campaigning for the re-election of congressional Democrats, especially in Ohio. There Obama has to mobilize his Black and student base.
His playing of the race card becomes even more glaring in the neiboring state of Pennsylvania, where he spends his second most campaign t+m this round, drumming up Black voters, especially in Philadelphia. Philadelphia has a notoriously unscrupulous Democratic Party history in elections, and in Obama's first national campaign the Philly voting was bedevilled with violent threats by the Black Panther Party, wielding baseball bats and positioning its demented minions close to the doors of polling places to intimidate Whites from casting their ballots within -- all of which the Attorney General of the USA, Eric Holder, has refused to prosecute because the videotaped vote-corruptors are Black, by his own statement, as reported by a Fed prosecutor in the inJustice Department. Only Whites cawt in similar activities woud face the strong arm of the law, according to the whistleblowing gov lawyer.
I'm sure the Panthers have learned their lesson, and will be much more stealthy in this round since Holder has given them a carte blanche, so the pantheroids won't want to embarass their Attorney General again.
The WSJ/NBC joint poll is worth reading if you're at all interested in the trends in American opinion surveys among potential voters. Read and go figure for yourself, I urge.
-- Politicarp
