It's Friday, October 31st, and things just got worse for Senator McCain. In the major tracking polls, he has not been over 45% for three weeks, and over the last three days, while his assault on Senator Obama has intensified, he has not budged in the polls. At a time when he needed a breakthrough, he has been mired in his own mud and stuck in place.
Mr. McCain goes into the campaign's final weekend a bigger underdog than any victorious candidate in a modern election. And with the economic news consistently going against him, it doesn't look good.
A Bloomberg article frames the facts: "With four days until Election Day, national polls show his Democratic rival Barack Obama leading by an average of 6 percentage points, and battleground polls show Obama ahead in more than enough states to win the decisive 270 Electoral College votes.
'There will not be a comeback curmudgeon by the name of John McCain,'' Kenneth Duberstein, who served as a chief of staff for President Ronald Reagan, said on Bloomberg Television's ``Conversations with Judy Woodruff,'' which will air later today. ``I think it's going to be Barack Obama. And I think it is going to be somewhere between 320 and 350 electoral votes.' "
Polls have been wrong before, of course, but modern polling has consistently gotten better. And with the advantage as high as it is for Mr. Obama, there appears to be little hope for the Senator from Arizona.
If the election goes as it looks, with not only Mr. Obama taking the Presidency, but also with expanded majorities in the House and Senate, then the new administration will at least begin next year with a mandate to make some major changes. If there has been one theme in this election that has worked, it has been that of change. Almost 90% of Americans believe the U.S. is on the wrong track, so they appear to be ready for a change.
My hope, if Mr. Obama wins, is that the change will get us back on track and allow America to recover its place as a world leader, not only in military might and economic strength, but in moral leadership as well. I am not convinced that Americans have abandoned their commitments to democracy, equality and fairness--those qualities that have served as a beacon of hope to the rest of the world during my lifetime. This leadership has been squandered over the last decade by corrupt and foolish political and business leaders. It's asking a lot of a single election to correct this huge a problem, but my hope is that it will at least start to reverse the process that has gotten us into this mess.
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