This is depressing

One of the best political polling sites that I follow regularly is fivethirtyeight.com. (538 is the number of votes in the electoral college.) They take a different approach to polling and polls of polls, distilling them down to what I think is the best snapshot of what's really happening in the electorate at any given time. They don't do any polls of their own, but they take all the national and state polls, weight them according to sampling size and technique, and then run various electoral college scenarios using that polling data. For example, if a state is polling at 50-50 or 51-49 Obama v. McCain, you could run two federal election scenarios, one with the state going Dem, and the other going GOP. With a dozen or so close swing states, the possible outcomes multiply quickly. Results are based on thousands of possible scenarios. The final result they come up with is the percentage odds of a party winning at any given time.

Now that I've confused the hell out of anyone reading this, I'll give you the reason for my depression. For the first time since I started following the site many months ago, McCain is ahead. It's hard to find any reason for optimism based on the current numbers. The state numbers don't look quite as bad as the national polls, but they are also fewer and older. It will take a while for the Palin Bounce to work its way through the individual state polls.

The Republicans are masters of divisive cultural campaigning. They are masters of changing the subject and framing the debate. They are masters of hiding the real issues, and they are masters of making people vote against their own self interests. They have no conscience when it comes to outright lies and the kind of personal slurs that would never be said to someone's face. Maybe Obama made a mistake when he turned down McCain's offer of unmediated townhall-style debates. I think Obama would have cleaned his clock and made McCain look like the doddering (but dangerous) old fool that he is. Somehow, Obama and the Democrats have to fight back, and fight back hard. I'd like to see McCain swift-boated. There is enough in his military record (crashing four planes before being shot down over Hanoi to site just one example) to show that he's not the hero he makes himself out to be. And I've never understood how 5-1/2 years as a prisoner of war qualifies anyone for anything. Using that metric, Guantanamo is the Harvard of future world leaders.

I can only hope that Americans will see the McCain campaign for what it is. It will only lead to another four years of Bush-style wars, deficits and recession. That is truly depressing.