Speaking of Democrats for McCain... I was just reading HillBuzz.wordpress.com, a pro-Hillary site. And they had something posted that seemed to exactly answer your question, Ann. (Emphasis mine.)
We read a report today that has us really scratching our heads — once we find that article again, we’ll link it here (or maybe an intrepid reader will find it for us).
This was a poll that said 54% of Americans thought Obama was more liberal than they are, and that something outrageous like 80% of them believe Obama was “very liberal”.
The thing that has us perplexed is why the media believes Obama will win this election if the majority of Americans are moderate centrists skewing slightly right, and Obama is seen as the most liberal candidate Democrats have ever run.
Those polls show Obama more liberal than Kerry or Gore, who both lost their elections — and more liberal than Clinton and Carter, who won theirs (well, Clinton won both of his, while Carter only had one term — and not coincidentally, Clinton was ranked as much less liberal than Carter).
In the last 7 presidential elections, voters chose presidents who ranked low on the liberal scale. Clinton, while more liberal than Bush or Dole, was seen as acceptably liberal to the majority of voters.
So, what puzzles us is the insistance from the media that things like this don’t matter this year.
Why would Americans suddenly change the way they’ve been voting in the last 7 presidential elections? The last candidate who approached Obama’s liberal level was Carter — who only barely won in 1976, and Carter had Whitewater at his back. And he still would have lost to Gerald Ford if the election had gone on for just one more week (and if Ford handn’t gaffed with his “Poland is not under Soviet influence” line in the debate). So, even with WATERGATE at his back, Carter’s high liberal profile almost did him in (and, technically, did sink his presidency, and his reelection).
We just think it’s so bizarre that the media insists Obama will win in a cakewalk, when they don’t explain why, suddenly, Americans who have voted in predictable patterns for generations are magically going to diverge from these behaviors…because MSNBC told them so?
