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Billy email MADBillyD@aol.com on Saturday, October 25, 2008 9:03:50 PM
Senator John McCain woke Thursday morning to what has become a fairly common greeting in these tough last weeks of his campaign. A raft of polls showing him well behind. Early post-mortems on his candidacy. Even Republicans speaking of him in the past tense.
But is it really over?
As Mr. McCain enters this closing stretch, his aides — as well as some outside Republicans and even a few Democrats — argue that he still has a viable path to victory.
“The McCain campaign is roughly in the position where Vice President Gore was running against President Bush one week before the election of 2000,” said Steve Schmidt, Mr. McCain’s chief strategist. “We have ground to make up, but we believe we can make it up.”
“It’s an uphill battle,” said Karl Rove, who was the chief strategist for President Bush going back to Mr. Bush’s first run for governor in 1994. “But I remember seven days out from the Texas gubernatorial race, and everybody was like, ‘It’s all over, we’re cooked!’ And we won by seven points.”
Here are what Mr. McCain’s advisers are watching hopefully (and Mr. Obama’s are watching warily) as the contest enters its final days.
Mr. McCain’s advisers said the key to victory was reeling back those Republican states where Mr. Obama has them on the run: Florida, where Mr. McCain spent Thursday; Indiana; Missouri; North Carolina; Ohio; and Virginia. If he can hang on to all those states as well as others that are reliably red, he would put into his column 260 of the 270 electoral votes necessary to win. Mr. McCain’s advisers said they would look for the additional electoral votes they need either by taking Pennsylvania from the Democrats, or putting together some combination of Colorado, Nevada, New Hampshire and New Mexico.
Two issues have turned up in the final days, courtesy of some inopportune remarks by Mr. Obama and his running mate, Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware. Both have entered the campaign dialogue, and it is probably a little too early to tell whether they will have the impact that Mr. McCain hopes they will.
The first was Mr. Obama’s response to the plumber in Ohio who asked about his proposal to increase income tax rates on households making over $250,000 a year, in which Mr. Obama asserted that there was a need to “spread the wealth.” Mr. McCain seized on the response to reprise the he-will-raise-your-taxes attack that has historically had resonance in states like Florida, Iowa and New Hampshire. “We believe we have traction with the tax issue,” said Charlie Black, a senior adviser to Mr. McCain.
The other was Mr. Biden’s prediction that a foreign power would test Mr. Obama with a crisis in the first months of his presidency. That remark goes to what has been the heart of Mr. McCain’s argument about the need for the next president to have experience in handling high-stakes situations. No one in Mr. Obama’s campaign is disputing the potential damage from Mr. Biden’s remark, but they hope it will be offset by the endorsement of Mr. Obama by Colin L. Powell, the former secretary of state, on Sunday.
(It is not over yet. Yes it will be hard but I believe if McCain does what he should do the American people will see what they will get with Obama in the White House. It is not over until the fat lady sings. Read more of the above story In McCain’s Uphill Battle, Winning Is an Option.)