Don't Panic

Dear Obama Nation,

Stop freaking out. It's not that bad. No, Hillary Clinton will not drop out of the nomination race tonight. Yes, John McCain has a head start on the general election. Yes, the entire United States of America is suffering from election fatigue.

BUT.

1) The Lingering Clintons: I wrote a couple of weeks back about why it's probably going to work out better for the party for Clinton to keep going now. One of the key points I made is how a shift in her rhetoric towards battling John McCain and leaving Obama alone could help pave the way for a party reconciliation in June after the voting has ended. Here's a report from last week suggesting that Clinton was doing just that. Here's a snippet from a Washington Post article this morning:

But while she presses forward, aides say she is determined neither to be pushed from the race prematurely nor to be seen as doing anything to damage Obama's prospects of winning in November if he emerges as the nominee. Her campaign team believes that is the best way to bring the party together as quickly as possible once the nomination contest is over.

Her advisers say that a major reason she does not want to be pressured out of the race is that she believes it will be easier to bring her supporters over to Obama once the primaries are over if they think she was able to finish the nomination battle on her own terms.

And then don't forget about her going out of her way to defend Obama from McCain on his charges regarding Hamas as well as from Bush on the appeasement remarks. And so on and so forth. We're getting closer and closer to a tag team campaign. Please stop panicking.


2) McCain's Head Start: John McCain is a ridiculously flawed candidate. It could easily be said that both parties are candidates based on the wrong issue: John McCain is the defense/war candidate, and Barack Obama is the against-the-war-from-the-start candidate. However, the top issue right now (and likely going into the election) is the economy. And John McCain can promise another fifty wars if he wants, but it won't change the fact that he knows jack about the economy (and admits it). However, he does know that a good conservateeve* candidate needs tax cuts, so right now they seem like a good idea.

More to the point John McCain isn't even a very good war candidate. First of all, it's slowly becoming apparent to the American public that the perpetual spending of billions of dollars that we're getting on loan from the People's Republic of China on a war that accomplishes nothing is actually a pretty serious drain on the economy. Furthermore, despite vocally denouncing waterboarding as torture and saying that the US shouldn't be doing it, he declined to vote for a bill that would have stopped us from doing it. Furthermore, he doesn't actually know who's running Iran, who he seems so eager to bomb the hell out of. Furthermore, despite being a veteran and decrying our current shoddy treatment of our veterans, he has declined to vote for the Webb-Hagel update to the GI Bill, which would finally address just one of the many problems we currently have with our services to veterans. Please stop panicking.

3) Election Fatigue: Barack Obama has run his campaign masterfully. He's campaigned well in all the right places, spent his money properly, kept his team unified and organized, put forth some revolutionary policy strategies, spoken with both distinguished articulation and personal affability. In almost every state that really counted where he was seriously trailing, he jumped by double-digits in the polls in the weeks before the vote.

John McCain's campaign, less than a year ago, was being trounced by some of the biggest twits and numbskulls in politics. In order to pull himself out of the gutter, he pledged himself to a public financing program which he designed, only to try to opt out of it when he found (much to his apparent bewilderment) that he was actually the nominee. McCain designed this public financing system, it's worth mentioning, to curb the influence of the lobbyists and special interest representatives who, after a year on staff, are resigning from the McCain organization now that people are actually paying attention. His campaign is being run by a team of twits and numbskulls that actually rival Mitt Romney and Rudy Giuliani in incompetence. Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton are duking it out over which candidate can best lead their party, while McCain is still on tours to introduce himself to voters and convince conservateeves that he's anything more than just a consolation prize. Even if voters ignore the race until mid-October, I really don't think Barack Obama will need five months to shore up his support amongst the Democratic base. And when moderate and swing voters finally do start paying attention to John McCain, it'll be pretty obvious why they don't want to vote for him.

Is there any indication from the way Barack Obama has run his campaign up until now that he won't be able to make this work?

So please. Stop panicking.



Yours as always,
Tim

*It drives me absolutely nuts that John McCain can't pronounce the word "conservative" properly. In order to acclimate myself to his version of the word, I'm going to start spelling it like he pronounces it whenever I'm talking about him.