Tuesday, July 29, 2008

Who leads among "likely" voters?

New Poll Shows McCain Leading Among Likely Voters
A new USA Today /Gallup national poll shows Sen. Barack Obama leading Sen. John McCain 47%-44% among registered voters. However, when the sample is reduced to only those likely to vote, McCain jumps to a 49%-45% lead. The survey, taken July 25-28, "showed a surge since last month in likely Republican voters and suggested Obama's trip may have helped energize voters who favor McCain." The poll surveyed 900 registered voters and 791 likely voters.

[...]

Trip Not A Plus For Obama? The Gallup poll, along with polls from battleground states and other national polls, are starting to generate commentary in the media on whether or not Obama's foreign swing in fact helped his campaign. Fox News' Special Report reported, "The political effect of Obama's tour of the Middle East and three European capitals...appears to be negligible. ... Late last month McCain trailed Obama among likely voters by six points." Fox News added "the Real Clear Politics average of all recent national polls shows a tight race with Obama leading McCain by just over three points about where he was before his overseas odyssey began." On MSNBC's Hardball, NBC correspondent Andrea Mitchell said the trip was "too much like a tour of a president, when he is -- he had to say, I'm not a president, I'm just a candidate, but that almost seemed a little bit disingenuous because he did seem like a touring head of state." On Fox News' Special Report roundtable, Fred Barnes said, "I think people are recognizing that he's just a regular old pol. He's a liberal one. He's an extremely well-spoken one. He carried off a great trip to Europe that was well staged and he didn't say anything foolish at all. But he spins and quibbles and makes up things and denies things and pretends like he says things that he didn't, and all this stuff that we have seen politicians do so many times."

Bold emphasis mine. It's the "making things up" that bothers me most. If he lies as easily and as often as the Clintons do, then what is the difference? Where is the "Change" that Obama's supposed to represent? Sounds like the same old Democrat politics to me.


More about Obama's European tour from George Handlery at the Brussels Journal:

Obama in Berlin: Wishy Instincts, Washy Preferences
     

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