OBAMA vs. McCAIN….For some reason, there seems to be endless chatter among liberals right now who are worried about how Obama is doing against McCain. Why is the race tightening? Why hasn’t there been a bump from Obama’s overseas trip? Etc. etc.
Beats me. But the race sure doesn’t seem to be tightening to me. Different polls show different things, and different poll averages show different things, but the one I usually use (from RealClear Politics) showed Obama ahead by 4.8 points last week and ahead by…..4.9 points this week. So he’s doing fine.
As for the world tour, it’s gotten him a ton of coverage during a month that’s usually light on people paying attention to politics, and the coverage has mostly been very positive. That’s a good thing. It may not have given him an instantaneous bump, but honestly, we should all calm down over stuff like this. Not everything shows up in tracking polls within 24 hours. The trip is good for Obama, it increases his foreign policy cred, and once it’s out of the way he’ll be pretty well positioned to stay home and bear down on the campaign later this summer.
Long story short, I’m not really very worried. McCain will make progress here and there depending on where he spends money and what the issue of the hour happens to be, but overall he’s not making up any ground. My bet is that three months and $300 million from now, Obama’s going to pick up several more points in the polls and be ahead of McCain by eight or nine points. It ain’t over til it’s over, but right now it doesn’t look to me like there’s really anything much to fret about.
