The Ticking Clock Meets the Perfect Storm

There are now five days left until election day and Barack Obama is up by about 6 percentage points. As such, he has a nearly insurmountable lead with little time left. Barack Obama is now in a position to try and run out the clock. Is he about to face a perfect storm of negative campaign news that will jeopardize his election? Let's examine the details.

1) The natural glow of being in the lead.

Most analysts say that at the end of any campaign the race tightens. What they almost never do is explain why. The reason this happens is that the candidate in the lead also receives the bulk of the media attention. Most candidates don't do as well when all the spotlight is on them because each of their policies and proposals is put under a microscope. Once any policy is shown in full view, warts and all, it almost never looks as good as it does when it is presented merely with talking points. As such, Barack Obama, and all his policies, will be put under the proverbial microscope and that will hurt the campaign.

2) Spread the wealth...Socialism...Wealth/Income Redistribution

Ever since Joe the Plumber, exposed Barack Obama's affinity for income redistribution, it has given the McCain campaign a new talking point. Watch any cable news show with McCain or his surrogate and they are on message. McCain and his surrogates will hammer Obama with the "income redistribution" label over and over. As a McCain supporter, this is actually frustrating. Barack Obama hasn't hidden his desire for income redistribution. Had McCain used this line of attack earlier the race would likely look a lot different. That said, in the last days of a campaign it is always important to come up with something new. McCain has a new message while Obama continues to hammer at old themes. Furthermore, the income redistribution attack was given new credence with the release of this audio.



If McCain is wise, he would also make issue of this statement Barack Obama made to the Democratic Socialists of America in Chicago in 1996.

The first is “human capital development”. By this he meant public education, welfare reform, and a “workforce preparation strategy”. Public education requires equality in funding. It’s not that money is the only solution to public education’s problems but it’s a start toward a solution. The current proposals for welfare reform are intended to eliminate welfare but it’s also true that the status quo is not tenable. A true welfare system would provide for medical care, child care and job training. While Barack Obama did not use this term, it sounded very much like the “social wage” approach used by many social democratic labor parties. By “workforce preparation strategy”, Barack Obama simply meant a coordinated, purposeful program of job training instead of the ad hoc, fragmented approach used by the State of Illinois today.

The state government can also play a role in redistribution, the allocation of wages and jobs. As Barack Obama noted, when someone gets paid $10 million to eliminate 4,000 jobs, the voters in his district know this is an issue of power not economics. The government can use as tools labor law reform, public works and contracts.

This would be the final verdict on Barack Obama's plan to redistribute wealth in America. Income redistribution is overwhelmingly unfavorable in the U.S. A Gallup poll in March showed that it was disapproved by 84-13. McCain is on message and he finally has one that is effectively corroding Obama's support.

3) Joe Biden

The Vice Presidential candidate has become a magnet for gaffes and controversy. It first started with this interview with Diane West.


The Obama campaign already shunned the station that employs West and now it appears they are banning a second station. This sort of contentious attitude toward any media that they don't like is frankly downright chilling.





This became an internet sensation and furthermore it turned West into a bit of a national celebrity for a couple days. By doing so, it attracted attention to not only very un Presidential behavior by Biden but also lingering questions about Obama's Marxist tendencies.

The second controversy came right on the heels of this one with West.



Finally, Biden had this interview...


in which he suggested that Obama would cut taxes to those that make $150,000 and less. Of course, the campaign has insisted it is only those making $200,000 and less. This lends more credence to McCain's contention that Obama is not being totally truthful when he says that his tax cuts will only be for the very wealthy. Since these gaffes, Biden has become incognito. As such, the campaign realizes that Biden is a disaster that needs to be muzzled. That's not a good place to be.

4) Rashid Khalidi

Yet another radical associate of Barack Obama's has emerged in the last weeks of the campaign. Now, Khalidi would be more of an issue if the L.A. Times released a tape in which Barack Obama praises Khalidi at an event, attended by among others Bill Ayers, while others at the same event condemn and spew venom at Israel. Still, one other radical associate of Barack Obama is not a good thing. Khalidi is the radical, now professor, and former spokesperson for the PLO, when that organization was deemed a terrorist group by the United States. Barack Obama was a colleague of Khalidi's at the University of Chicago. It's unclear if only partisans care about this. There is certainly a lot of buzz about this in the right blogosphere, however I don't know how many independents care. They would care a lot more, however, if they saw on tape Barack Obama singing praise to this man at an event in which Israel was demonized.

5) Campaign donation fraud.

This is likely the most important scandal and also the one that will have the least impact. Here is what the Washington Post said.

In September, according to the campaign, $1.8 million in online contributions was flagged, and $353,000 was refunded. Of the contributions flagged because a foreign address or bank account was involved, 94.1 percent were found to be proper. One-tenth of one percent were marked for refund, and 5.77 percent are still being vetted.

But clearly invented names have been used often enough to provoke an outcry from Republican critics. Donors to the Obama campaign using false names such as Doodad Pro and Good Will gave $17,375 through 1,000 separate donations, with no sign that they immediately tripped alarms at the campaign. Of more concern, Cairncross said, are reports that the campaign permitted money from 123 foreign nationals to enter its accounts.

Obama officials said they have identified similar irregularities in the finance records of their Republican rival, Sen. John McCain. "Every campaign faces these challenges -- John McCain's campaign has refunded more than $1.2 million in contributions from
anonymous, excessive and fraudulent contributors -- and we have reviewed and
strengthened our procedures to ensure that the contributions the campaign accepts are appropriate," said Ben LaBolt, an Obama spokesman.

McCain's contributor database shows at least 201 donations from individuals listing themselves as "anonymous" or "anonymous anonymous," according to Obama's
campaign. In one particularly embarrassing episode, the McCain campaign mistakenly sent a fundraising solicitation to the Russian ambassador to the United Nations.

Now, it's unlikely that mos of the public will even know about Senator Obama's troubling lack of oversight of credit card donations. The campaign has removed many safeguards that normally guard against fraud. It accepts pre paid cards, and it has accepted donations from those that clearly have made up names. The campaign says that they have plenty of safeguards on the "back end". That means that they have safeguards to insure that fraudulent donations are caught after they have been received, but they collected $150,000,000 last month alone. Furthermore, how in the world can they spot fraud from a pre paid credit card? Unfortunately, I believe that Barack Obama will take no political hit for this but he should.

There you have it. Five days left and a lead that is nearly insurmountable, but there is also a perfect storm of campaign trouble. An irresistable force meets an immovable object. Which will win? We'll find out on November 4th.