Trash On The Beach
About the Author: I am an ex-urbanite who escaped the city life and has lived for the past 27 years in a rural, mountainous area of Virginia that in colonial and early-American times was part of the "Backcountry." Politics: Democrat by tradition, but moderate-to-conservative views on most issues; I fit the description of "traditionalist." Please visit my Web site, Backcountry Notes, at http://www.backcountrynotes.com/ Read more from this authorFrom a McCain Democrat’s Journal; Sunday, September 7, 2008
Today’s tracking polls have both reported; the Rasmussen poll of likely voters has the race tied and the Gallup poll of registered voters has the McCain-Palin ticket up by 3. These numbers indicate a six-point turnaround in the Rasmussen stats and a remarkable 11-point turnaround in the Gallup results over a period of five days. The professors and pundits expect this trend to continue - - the only question is how high the McCain-Palin advantage will go.
Many moons ago, my siblings and I were walking the shoreline at Virginia Beach with a group of adults. An old beach hand asked me if I knew how to tell when the high tide had peaked; I confessed that I did not. “The trash line,” he said, pointing to a ragged line of drying seaweed, skate egg-cases, sea-oat stalks and assorted flotsam and jetsam. “You know the tide has turned when you see the trash on the beach.”
The tide has turned in this Presidential election, and the metaphorical beach of the Obama-Biden ticket is littered with a line of trash. The “trash,” in this case, consists largely of the atttacks, slanders, and falsehoods that have been hurled at Sarah Palin by the Obama campaign and its adherents. These include not only the many blatantly sexist attacks in the media, but such things as the “book-banning” slander which was posted for a time on the Obama-Biden Web site. (Since being proven false, It has been removed without comment, of course, but we’ve become accustomed to such things, so you can see a .pdf copy here.)
There is so much of this “trash” that I haven’t the time to keep up with it. Fortunately, Michelle Malkin is keeping track, and there is a listing with hotlinks on the Explorations blog site.
The first time I heard these kinds of beach-trash rumors was in 1960, during the Kennedy-Nixon contest. When Kennedy took the lead in the polls in October, a number of anti-Catholic and racist slanders were put into circulation by Nixon supporters. One of them held that Joe Kennedy, JFK’s father, had a fleet of ocean liners off the coast, filled with Africans, and that JFK was going to grant them all citizenship as soon as he was elected. Just as sexist anti-Palin remarks have been disguised as literate commentary in the press, anti-Catholic sentiment was directed against Kennedy in much the same way.
The Obama campaign and its adherents realize, of course, that the nomination of Sarah Palin to be John McCain’s Vice-president is, as they say, a “game-changer.” Unless they can knock Palin down, the Obama folks will lose the election. So the attacks will continue; and maybe the tide will turn again before November 4, and maybe it won’t. My expectation is that McCain and Palin will have a substantial lead, outside of the polling margin of error, by week’s end, and will keep it up to the first days of November.
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LINKS:
37.2 Million Watch Sarah Palin Accept Her Party’s Nomination
Sarah Palin - - Obama’s Worst Nightmare
Oinkin’ From The Boinkin’: Sexist Pig Of The Day Award, September 5
Reaction To McCain Choosing Palin As Running Mate
Sarah Palin versus The Establishment Elite
Good piece, Jay.
Beach trash. Now that’s a fitting moniker for Obama and his campaign.
And for what it’s worth, I do think that McBrilliant and Gov. Sarahcuda will keep that lead right through Election Night.
What concerns me, given that they will do that, is serious voter fraud by the Obama camp. Given his relationship with ACORN, synonymous with voter fraud, I’d expect nothing less than that sleaze from him.
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