Gallup: Obama's Bizarre Post-Debate Bounce Gone; McCain Now Trails by 4

The lead had been eight (which I forgot to mention on Sunday and Monday), then it was six, now it's four.

Allah notes the state polls show bad news -- but these always seem to be trailing indicators. Just the same as the state polls showed McCain still ahead even as his national lead was disappearing.

Although it doesn't seem to make sense, state polls only seem to reflect trends first spotted in national polls three or four days earlier.

I continue being baffled by the poll bounce at all. I'm not in the tank about these things -- I thought Bush either held his own or won against Gore. I think my sentiment was shared by the majority of the public. I thought Bush lost badly to Kerry, at least on points and such, and at least in the one debate I really watched. (The other one I watched in a debate "party" in a bar and couldn't really evaluate.) The public, I think, either agreed that Bush lost, or didn't think he lost all that much. Either way, I wasn't overly jazzed about Bush.

So this last debate: I thought McCain really demolished him. How I could have been not only wrong but very wrong, I don't know.

Bradley effect? I was really right but people are too scared to say the skinny black kid with the funny name, as Barack Hussein Obama would say, wasn't really all that "clean and articulate," as Joe Biden would say, after all?

Or maybe it's this thing about Pakistan. McCain's now pot-committed to the losing hand that one shouldn't say we'd violate Pakistan's sovereignty to get bin Ladin (even though, of course, we're doing that right now with mid-level Al Qaeda leaders, and McCain, presumably, supports this), and so he's going to keep on losing on a technically-correct point because the public just wants to hear we'll get bin Ladin.

McCain's kind of painted himself into a rhetorical corner on that. On one hand, he says he'll follow bin Ladin to the gates of hell; on the other hand, he doesn't want to say he'll follow him to the gates of Pakistan. I get why. But does the public? Apparently not.

A Republican is allowing himself to be "out-Bubba'ed," as Clinton would say, which is always a bad thing.

posted by Ace at 02:41 PM

| Access Comments