We Are Winning

I've often wondered how it is that national polls can be so far out of whack. I remember in late September, early October of 2000, Al Gore was leading by points in the low teens over George W. Bush in almost all the national polls. Yet when it came down to it, Bush gave Gore a sound drubbing in the election. Why?

DJ Drummond explains for us just WHY the national polls are so often wrong, and gives us the proper leader in the national Polls, John McCain.

The good stuff is actually in the comments at the end, where he explains to a reader how he came up with his results and why:

the thing you have to remember about ALL polls, is that certain assumptions are made. Some are quite reasonable, counting a certain percentage for men and a certain amount for women, and the same for differen traces, geographic regions, and so on.

But the Obama Love Fest in the media is circular logic. He gets more press, so he must have more support, so the polls are weighted to show far more democrats than are actually out there. I'm not talking about the historic advantage of democrats to republicans 38 or 39 percent of the voters to the GOP's 35 or 36 percent. I mean polls which weigh as much as 45% democrats to 25% republicans. I will agree that turnout is critical, and if the republicans give up and sit at home, the democrats MAY get their 40-45% of the voters in which case the media-driven polls become self-fulfilling prophecies. But if republicans stay charged, then at the worst they can match almost all of the democrats' votes, and it comes down to a group that the polls have been strangely quiet about.

The independents.

Did you wonder why McCain took the tone he did in the first debate, Mister Reasonable and not on the attck, even when it looked like he had an easy line to Obama's weak spots? Obama was speaking like a democrat, McCain aimed for the indies.

Why have the polls not shown his results? Two reasons. First, polls have crunched hard on indies, because about ONE-THIRD of them have still not made up their mind (from internals at Gallup, CBS, and Fox polls), and so they are down-weighted, as little as 10% of the voters in some cases. And two, most of them are still making up their minds, and the debate laid seeds. It's not an overnight thing.

I tell you plainly, McCain is winning right now, when you take the polls, use their internals to back-step the weighting and re-weight with historical norms.

We.
Are.
Winning.

And here is the money quote, right at the end:

Ever wonder why Obama is nastier than ever? Why did they try such an obvious dirty trick with getting Ifil as the moderator for the VP debate? He's losing and he knows it.

All Obama can do is bluff, but we have to be careful and not buy the hype.

I know a few Republicans and Conservatives out there that just emotionally seesaw back and forth on this with every new poll showing Obama pulling into the lead, or McCain tightening the race. These folks need to calm down. Realize that the national polls ALWAYS give the Dems a leg up, and that the campaign's internal polls do not reflect the public polls, they reflect DJ Drummond's poll data.

Yes, it's close. But we ARE Winning. As long as we don't give up yet, and keep sprinting towards the finish line, we will beat the Dems, and America will send John McCain and Sarah Palin to Washington as President and Vice President.

WE ARE WINNING!

What Just Happened?

Another great video describing the real problem behind the bailout, Democrats.

A Letter from Fred Thompson

I received this e-mail from Fred Thompson the other day. Those of you not on his mailing list may have missed it, so I will reprint it here for you.

When John McCain selected Governor Sarah Palin, as his running mate, the Democrats and their far-left constituency let out a primal scream that could be heard from sea to shining sea. How dare he choose someone that they and their pals in the media had not had a chance to vet (i.e. libel, slander, and otherwise eviscerate). Ah, but it was not too late. These seekers of “a new kind of politics” poured torrents of malicious abuse upon her and her family.

Plane loads of scandal mongers, lawyers and other truth seekers became more numerous in Alaska than the polar bear, as they rallied local Democrats and disgruntled Republicans to their cause.

Here was a woman who chose to have children and a career. Aging Washington socialites weighed in with newly discovered sensitivity for mothers with careers outside the home. Here was a woman who became upset because her ex-brother-in-law had tasered her nephew and threatened her father. The Democrats and their friends had to save the country from a woman like this.

Governor Palin’s every comment was scrutinized by the media and judged against what Jefferson or Lincoln might have said. Never mind that her counterpart, the 30-year-Washington-veteran Joe Biden, apparently is unaware that America relies upon coal for a lot of it’s electricity or that he recently referred to a top level U.S. official’s visit to Iran that never happened. That’s just Joe being Joe – protected by the sheer number of his gaffes and the fact that he is Barack Obama’s running mate.

For a while there it seems the fact that so many uninformed yahoos (average people) love her was going to drive the main stream media nuts. They had a hard time grasping the fact that people like her because she is precisely the kind of politician that everyone has been saying they’ve wanted: Independent, not a captive of the Beltway including a Congress with a 9% approval rating, who will take on hacks of either party; who has the tenacity to win and the courage to fight for the long-term benefit of those she represents.

Apparently what no one counted on was that a politician like this would actually show up on the national scene. The media was caught by surprise. The media doesn’t like surprises.

Naturally, there was a backlash to the treatment of Governor Palin and cooler-headed critics have largely concentrated on what they claim is her lack of qualifications. Of course much of the criticism of her qualifications reveals the application of the same old double standard. Less accomplished governors in times past have been considered to be perfectly “well-qualified” as VP picks.

However, it is a legitimate issue and should be taken seriously. I especially take seriously the criticism of people such as New York Times columnist David Brooks who I consider to be an insightful analyst of the political scene.

He recently wrote that governance is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all it requires prudence. What is prudence? Among other things, it is the ability to absorb information and discern the essential current of events – the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and to understand which arguments have the most weight. How is prudence acquired? Through experience. Experience allows a leader to judge what is important and what is not. He added, “Sarah Palin has many virtues. If you wanted someone to destroy a corrupt establishment, she’d be your woman. But the constructive act of governance is another matter.”

One can hardly disagree with the desirability of our leaders having the qualities that Brooks describes (putting aside the question of how many of our leaders who are not Sarah Palin have demonstrated these qualities). But there are other important qualifications, such as will, courage, and determination. Frankly, an infusion of these qualities into our body politic is desperately needed – not just to raise hell with the establishment, but to speak the hard truth about unpleasant choices facing our country. To push for choices that will, in the long term, benefit our country, our children and our grandchildren. In other words, things which “prudent” leaders are all too often reluctant to do.

For many years we have failed to address looming problems that will prove catastrophic to our nation. It’s not because we are bereft of leaders with great experience. And it is not because they do not understand the “essential current of events.” They know these things all too well. It is because they do not have the political courage to do anything about it.

Recently, a Washington Post editorial pointed out that even before the recent financial crisis on Wall Street, the Government Accountability Office issued a report declaring the federal government on an “unsustainable long term fiscal path.” This was primarily due to the projected cost of Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, brought on by an aging population. We will be spending $41 trillion dollars more on these entitlements in the next 75 years than we will receive in payroll taxes and premiums, although the crunch will actually begin much sooner than that. And we already owe Japan and China about $500 billion each.

David Walker, the former Comptroller General of the United States calls this problem much larger than the recent financial rescue plan. In fact he calls it the “super sub-prime crisis.” Which bring me to the current sub-prime crisis.

Wall Street and Washington were full of people who were “qualified and experienced” in the field of finance. Sen. Barack Obama, for one, has a great deal of experience in the housing field. So do many of his closest advisers. I would have traded some of that experience for a few more leaders with less experience and more courage to buck the establishment and tell the truth about what was happening.

This brings me back to Governor Sarah Palin, and why I say that courage and political will are at the very top of the “qualification” requirements for today’s leaders. So the question is, how does Sarah Palin compare on that score with Biden and Obama, for that matter? Very well, I’d say.

Let us all pray for Sarah Palin, that she will allow her true self to shine through tonight at the VP debate. She's got allot stacked against her, but I'm confident that she can really knock 'em dead. GO SARAHCUDA!

UPDATE:

Sarah absolutely wiped the floor with Joe Biden! Fantastic performance, I couldn't be happier!