The mainstream media did everything they could to knock off Hillary Clinton in the Primary Election and John McCain in the General Election in order to help elect Barack Obama the 44th President of the United States. Fortunately, their attempt to convince the American people that the inexperienced and untested Junior Senator from Illinois was qualified to be President has backfired.
While the media try to weave a story of a unified Democratic Party and a Republican Party in turmoil, the facts point to a different outcome. While I may be one of the few pundits in America that think John McCain will win on Tuesday, I hold firm to the lessons learned in the Democratic Primary and Politics 101.
For anyone to win the Presidency, he/she must unify their base, split the Independent votes and steal one more vote from the other side. Although the media's polls have unanimously concluded that Obama will sweep to victory on Tuesday, there remains fundamental problems for the Obama campaign with their base of Democratic voters. Since Obama's problems from this summer's Democratic Primary have not been resolved, nor reported by the national media, the Electoral College map signals trouble for the media's main man.
Throughout the Democratic Primary election, Obama never garnered significant support from four of the major groups within the Democratic base. Union members, women, older voters and Jewish voters all were Hillary Clinton supporters in significant numbers. While the national media did focus on the disgruntled female supporters of Hillary Clinton in the lead up to the Democratic National Convention in Denver, they dropped the issue after Obama won the nomination at the Convention.
However, the media's short attention span has not solved the problem for the man whose Pastor of 20 years still gives many Americans pause. Additionally, there has been very little written or aired about the lack of support for Obama with older voters, Jewish voters and union members. The assumption that the 25 million people who voted for Hillary and the rest of the Democratic candidates now have Obama yard signs will prove to be a fatal mistake for the media and Howard Dean.
Now I will admit that the majority of the members of these groups will ultimately end up voting for the Democratic nominee, but the slightest amount of slippage in the percentage of these voters means Obama will not have the support the media and the polls are assuming he will have. And this is no small problem. Since Obama has not united the Democratic Party the way Sarah Palin helped John McCain unite the Republican Party, the 44th President of the United States will be John S. McCain.
If this doesn't make sense to you then your emotions have carried you away from reality. McCain doesn't need the majority of supporters from these traditional Democratic groups in order to win today. McCain needs to get only a small amount because these voters are not independents or swing voters, these people are traditional and frequent Democratic voters.
None of the main media outlets have looked in to whether or not these groups, who did not support Obama in the Primary, have come back to the Democratic base. But they have not. How else does one explain the fact that Pennsylvania gave Hillary a huge win in the Primary and is still giving Obama trouble today. Pennsylvania is a traditionally Democratic State and yet in this anti-Republican year, Obama has failed to close the deal. A closer look at Ohio, West Virginia, Missouri and even Michigan suggests that union members and older Americans are not comfortable with Barack Obama.
The media, however, have all but called the race for Obama; but they have overplayed their hand. While CNN reports, as they did last week, that Obama is up in Missouri and NPR and the New York Times are trying to convince us that North Carolina and Virginia are really toss-up states, the American electorate quietly wait for the opening of the polls.