HappySqurriel said:
Realistically, this election will (probably) be so close because McCain chose Palin ... John McCain has difficulty relating to average-ordinary working/middle-class Americans, fiscally conservative people, and socially conservative people; these are the voters that are most commonly considered the “Base” of the Republican party and without them it would be difficult to win an election. There are no established conservative-republicans who could have attracted the attention and support from the Republican base like Sarah Palin has. |
You win primaries by electrifying the base, not elections. It doesn't matter if you win your base (who will probably vote for you anyways), it matters if you win the people in the middle of the electorate. Sarah Palin does not appeal to people in the middle of the electorate.
Palin’s qualifications to be president now rank as voters’ top concern about John McCain’s candidacy - “ahead of continuing President Bush’s policies, enacting economic policies that only benefit the rich and keeping too high of a troop presence in Iraq,” according to a new NBC/Wall Street Journal poll.
Fifty-five percent of respondents now say Palin is not qualified to serve as president, a five-point jump from the previous NBC/WSJ survey.
In addition, for the first time, more voters have a negative opinion of her than a positive one. In the survey, 47 percent view her negatively, versus 38 percent who see her in a positive light.
That’s a striking shift since McCain chose Palin as his running mate in early September, when she held a 47 to 27 percent positive rating.
We had two bags of grass, seventy-five pellets of mescaline, five sheets of high-powered blotter acid, a salt shaker half full of cocaine, a whole galaxy of multi-colored uppers, downers, screamers, laughers…Also a quart of tequila, a quart of rum, a case of beer, a pint of raw ether and two dozen amyls. The only thing that really worried me was the ether. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible and depraved than a man in the depths of an ether binge. –Raoul Duke
It is hard to shed anything but crocodile tears over White House speechwriter Patrick Buchanan's tragic analysis of the Nixon debacle. "It's like Sisyphus," he said. "We rolled the rock all the way up the mountain...and it rolled right back down on us...." Neither Sisyphus nor the commander of the Light Brigade nor Pat Buchanan had the time or any real inclination to question what they were doing...a martyr, to the bitter end, to a "flawed" cause and a narrow, atavistic concept of conservative politics that has done more damage to itself and the country in less than six years than its liberal enemies could have done in two or three decades. -Hunter S. Thompson
