12 Reasons Why McCain Can Still Win

Light at Huffington Post. Must be a mistake. Of course he clouds his light with bias, but he does show some light. William Bradley: Huffington Post: * America "turns the page" back to a calmer economic moment, enabling cultural issues to come to the fore. Some say it's just bad luck that McCain is running against Obama in a year of economic crisis. Others think it's poetic justice, since he has mainly supported the Bush/Cheney economic policies. Whichever it is, McCain needs a greater sense of calm in the US economy. It could happen. ** The closed credit spigot is opened. Of course, in order for Team McCain to turn the page away from a pervasive sense of economic crisis, the locked credit market must become decidedly unlocked. Right now, the State of California is in deep crisis, with its usual cash-flow issue at this time of year metastasizing in to potential disaster as the usual lenders turn a deaf ear. This is going on everywhere. Of course, if big financial concerns really want a continuance of Republican governance in the White House, they can start lending money. We'll see how they "vote." ** McCain finds an economic initiative ... other than suspending his campaign to pass the Wall Street bailout bill, earmark reform, and big tax breaks for corporations and the rich. The campaign suspension fell flat, as McCain delivered nothing much and ended up debating Obama last week anyway. Earmark reform, well, hardly any voters know what that bit of Potomac-speak means and it's a drop in the bucket of the federal deficit anyway. The tax breaks? "Joe Sixpack" on "Main Street" sitting around his "kitchen table" -- and each of those are egregious cliches used by supposed populists who don't know many people outside their very own elite bubbles -- doesn't relate to big corporate tax breaks. Schwarzenegger had a big infrastructure program that was central to his re-election campaign. Maybe McCain can do something to stimulate the economy. Or push for a health care program. Something that concretely gets things moving or helps "average people," another pol-speak cliche, with their real lives. ** The debate shifts to national security. McCain, of course, sees himself as a wartime president. And we are at war. It's just not war that is presently playing to his 20th century war hero strengths. But a sudden crisis that people relate to -- not Russia's easy war with Georgia, prompted by McCain's rather gullible friend Misha Saakashvili's predictably backfiring baiting of the bear -- could shift things quickly. This would not be triggered by McCain, a man of honor in these areas. It might be triggered by someone abroard who wants McCain elected, for their own purposes. As with Osama bin Laden's very late move in 2004, which helped stop John Kerry's late surge against President Bush. ** The campaign refocuses on Obama. Clearly, the McCain campaign wants the focus all on Obama, his youth, his relative inexperience, his relatively exotic background, his supposed economic, social and geopolitical radicalism, and his associations with Jeremiah Wright, Bill Ayers, etc. This means a highly negative campaign, waged both by McCain and aligned entities. This is tried and true for the Republicans.