If Obama Wins This Election

If Obama wins this election, there is a turning point that I will highlight as being THE turning point in the race and that turning point came on September 15, 2008. This is the day that John McCain uttered the now infamous "the fundamentals of our economy are strong" line on the campaign trail while the campaign was collapsing around him. If Obama takes the oath of office, this is the turning point in my book.

McCain had smartly stole Obama's thunder after Obama's convention by choosing Sarah Palin as his VP and then having his Republican convention, thus deflating Barack Obama's post-convention bounce and doubling his own post-convention bounce on the back of Palin's nomination. It was an impressive political coup but the economy brought this to a screeching halt. Obama posted a 47.8% to 44.3% lead according to pollster.com, which is quite the switch considering Obama was running consistently behind McCain before this economic issue.

That great equalizer of all candidates, reality, then stepped in. The Democrats make hay on the economy and the economy has been melting down, giving the advantage to Obama. Palin made a serious mistake today by broaching the idea that there could be another Great Depression. The McCain campaign should not even be playing in that side of the pool at this point. While Palin was attempting to blame the Democratic Congress for holding up the bailout and causing another Great Depression, all that any voter heard was "Great Depression" and when voters are confronted with economic woes, time and time again they run to Democrats to fix the economy.

Also, John McCain may think that he is helping himself by appearing like he cares about the economy, suggesting that the debate on Friday, September 26, 2008 be realigned from foreign policy to economic policy, but in reality he is making another serious mistake. Obama had been preparing to debate foreign policy on Friday because that is what the debate had been agreed to be about and debating foreign policy might have changed the narrative of the campaign slightly so that the environment is not so toxic to Republicans because of the economy. In reality, by changing the topic instead of letting it develop as it was planned, McCain has hurt himself. The longer the economy leads in the news, the more it hurts McCain. People that are jittery about their pocketbooks vote Democrat and have voted Democrat since 1932. McCain should resign himself to the fact that he cannot best Barack Obama on the economy and try to use things like this previously planned debate to move the discussion away from the economy and onto territory that is more favorable to him as a candidate and more favorable to his party.

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