Originally Posted by kane

I guess we will see. Here are a few examples of what I am saying from the past.

Example #1 - Gore V Bush 2000: Gore is basically handed the presidency on a silver platter. Clinton is very popular as he leave office and Gore is a sure thing. The republicans are running a guy who is a short term governor and a bad governor at that. A guy who has failed at just about everything he has ever tried. It should be a slam dunk. But Gore refuses to let Clinton help him and he won't fight dirty and it costs him. If Gore attacked Bush's past record and let Clinton do his thing he could have won.

Example #2 - Kerry V Bush 2004: Bush is very unpopular. The economy is in the shiter and things are looking bad for us globally. Kerry comes out strong and seems very presidential. The guy can speak and debates well and is a decorated military veteran. The Bush hits him with the swift boat stuff and Kerry, for reasons known only to him, decides he isn't going to fight back. Guess what? The people want to vote for someone that will fight for them and stand up for them and if Kerry won't defend himself how will he defend us? So, as we know, he loses.

Now another golden opportunity awaits. Bush has all times low approval ratings (historic lows even) and republicans are being indicted left and right. The country is sick of them and things are not going well. So what do the democrats do? They decide to penalize Florida and Michigan for moving their primaries up. No matter that it was republicans that moved the date up, they still decide to penalize the state and basically tell the voters of those states, "You can vote, but the votes won't count." This may not have mattered if Hillary had done as many predicted and ran away with the nomination from day one. Much to everyone's shock Obama puts up a fight and suddenly, guess what, Florida and Michigan matter. Hillary wins both of those states. Never mind that she was the only one on the ballot in one of them and the only one that, against the will of the DNC, went to Florida. She still won them, but they don't count so what do we get from this? We get a group of people that are so pissed they will vote for McCain just because they think Hillary got screwed and they want the DNC to pay. Factor into that the reality that somewhere around lat January when people started realizing that Obama wasn't going to go away the campaign somehow left normalcy and became this, "historic" movement. There was suddenly a ton of focus on the historic significance of what we were seeing and less and less paid to what these people were saying. They had the eyes of the nation on them and they bickered back and fourth at each other like a couple of school kids. Obama finally did the right thing when he just started ignoring Hillary and acting like he was the nominee and got back on message, but this left a door for McCain and the republicans.

Obama has been brilliant since it was clear that he was going to be the nominee. He has registered a lot of voters and got them out to the polls. We will see if he can do it again in November. Recent history shows the democrats do a great job of registering people, but many of them don't turn out on election day. If the democrats lose this election, another election that basically handed to them, you have to look back on a few things as the cause. First is the debacle with Florida and Michigan and second is some people from the party not sitting Hillary and Obama down and telling them to play nice instead of ripping each other apart and making some independents hate both of them.

Obama is a rock star. He speaks to 80,000 at a time while McCain is lucky to draw 1,000. He will raise maybe twice or three time the money that McCain will, that doesn't mean he will win. I think he will, but there is no guarantee and he sure as didn't get much help from his party early on.