Posted by
Always To The Right on Friday, October 10, 2008 6:21:44 PM
McCain still has it within his own power to win. “Not Over Yet”
Yet for all the gloom, there are several reasons why this race is by no means over.
First,
it is not clear that panic, hysteria, and the “Great Depression” will
continue to be the headlines and lead-ins each night for the next three
weeks. We may be soon reaching a bottom in the stock market. Sometime
in the next few days, wiser investors should see that trillions of
global dollars are now piling up and could begin to prime the economy —
and that still valuable stocks, for a brief period, are up for sale at
once-in-a-lifetime bargains. With the sudden collapse of oil prices,
the West has been given a staggering reprieve of hundreds of billions
of dollars in savings on its imported fuel bills. That economy too will
result in more liquidity at home. Given the shameless behavior of Wall
Street, and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, it will be unlikely that we
will revert soon to the Wild West speculation that had for the last six
years transformed the once pedestrian notion of seeing a house as a
home and refashioned it into either a politically correct entitlement
or a Las Vegas poker chip to be thrown down on the roulette table.
It is still possible that, by the week before the
election, there will be a sense of respite rather than continued anger
and panic — and any day in which hysteria is not the topic of the day
benefits McCain. In this regard, McCain must keep
reminding in simple fashion that Freddie and Fannie were catalysts that
drew in the Wall Street sharks: crooked officials cooked the books to
get mega-bonuses; they got away with their crimes by lavishing money on
mostly Democratic legislators (including Obama); and hand-in-glove they
all covered — and still are covering — their tracks under a
reprehensible politically correct cynicism.
Iraq is no
longer the contentious issue of the primaries where Democratic
candidates outdid each other in predicting failure, but mirabile dictu
turning out to be a clear American victory. No one can now believe that
withdrawal by March 2008, as Sen. Obama once advocated, would have been
anything but an utter calamity. McCain needs to continue to emphasize
the dire consequences of accepting such a defeat. The military is not
broken, but now the most experienced, battle-hardened force in the
world. Iraq is not, as Joe Biden once demanded, trisected into feuding
fiefdoms, but an emerging consensual state. The more Iraq is out of the
news, the more the growing public acceptance that it is becoming a
success. McCain should continue to ask: Did Americans want victory in November 2008 or defeat in March 2008?
The Ayers controversy is cited by the in-the-tank media
as signs of McCain’s desperation. Perhaps. But amid the tsk-tsking,
there are also certain deer-in-the-headlights moments among Obama’s
handlers.
Why? There are simply too many ACORNs, Ayers,
Khalidis, Pflegers, Wrights, et al. not to suggest a pattern unbecoming
of a future President of the United States. Obama’s past statements
about his relationship with Ayers (and others) simply cannot be
reconciled with the factual circumstances of their long association.