The Latest Poll Bounce

For the third time in this long election season, Barack Obama is seeing a large gap open to his favor in the polls. Gallup Daily has him winning by 8 points, Rasmussen has him winning by 6 and in every other major poll in this country he is ahead of his rival, Republican John McCain. On a CBS morning talk show the day a Washington Post poll revealed the first of such leads, it was stated that no candidate since 1948 has lost from the position Barack Obama is in right now. 

However, the detractors would claim that Obama has bumped and bounced before. What’s different this time?

Unlike the other big leads Obama has held this election season (mind you, he has led consistently besides for a few days after the Republican National Convention), Barack Obama is seeing substance behind the bounce and this time it isn’t only he that’s doing it for him. Something in this country has happened that has people thinking twice about the silly emails they receive about Obama being a Muslim. A crisis has struck while the Republicans sat and warned about crises on the loom; this bounce, and now this election, is different because it comes out of an actual event, something tangible that has made people wake up and realize where the future of this country needs to be. Rather than listen to McCain ramble about earmarks and sing about bombing Iran, America has been thrust into a reality that only one leader of the two can actually fix. The market meltdown is something that affects every single American citizen and McCain has dug himself into a hole by declaring that the “economy is fundamentally strong,” by “suspending” his campaign and “postponing” the debate in an obvious political ploy, and by shooting himself in the foot by making a Vice Presidential pick that shows what he means when he says “country first”: nothing. 

The economic problems in this country have only just begun, unfortunately. Today, the widely controversial $700 bailout was defeated in the house in what was considered to be an easy passage until Old Maverick decided it was the place of the guy who declared he knows nothing of the economy to come fix the situation! Presidential politics had no place in something that was effectively a Capitol Hill battle; McCain, a little down at the news of the polls, just thought that he’d make himself look like a “leader” and put “country first” again by stopping the world for a photo op. While the country is distracted by this and the defeat of this monstrous chunk of tax payer money, the biggest financial institutions in the country are either being bought out, collapsed, or both! 

As the problems sustain and grow and as the mendacity of the McCain campaign, their cynical and tired political ads, and Pitbull Palin become a further, more visible burden for voters, expect this bounce to be final.