Too Close To Call

The presidential race is still too close to call and could come down to the very last weekend before voters decide if they like or distrust Barack Obama, a national pollster predicts.

“I don’t think Obama has closed the deal yet,” pollster John Zogby told the Herald yesterday.

Zogby’s latest poll, released yesterday in conjunction with C-Span and Reuters, shows Obama and John McCain in a statistical dead heat, with the Illinois Democrat up 48-45 percent.

Zogby said the race mirrors the 1980 election, when voters didn’t embrace Ronald Reagan over then-President Jimmy Carter until just days before the election.

“The Sunday before the election the dam burst,” Zogby said of the 1980 tilt. “That’s when voters determined they were comfortable with Reagan.”

Now voters are wrestling with two senators with opposite resumes - Obama, at 47, the unknown, and the established 72-year-old McCain.

Zogby said he’s still hearing from moderates and non-partisan voters - what he calls “the big middle” - who are still shopping for a candidate.

“It still can break one way or the other,” Zogby says.

This is why it is critically important that Republicans not lose heart. Barack Obama is not a closer. He has to either clear the field by getting his opponents disqualified and removed from the ballot or drop some last-minute slime bomb on them when it is too late for them to do damage control.

Even in the Democrat primary he did not win the popular vote among Democrat primary voters but had to manipulate easily gamed caucuses and even then he had to be carried over the finish line by the superdelegates.

Obama is deeply vulnerable to attacks on his character, his judgment and his patriotism. Obama's past shows a pattern of connections to radical figures such as communist revolutionary and domestic terrorist William Ayers and racist "pastor" Jeremiah Wright. Recently a new and in some ways even more troubling association has come to light.

It seems that Obama has been in close contact with Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga. Mr. Obama was in almost daily contact with Odinga serving as a campaign advisor to the Kenyan during his run for office. Documents uncovered by journalist Jerome Corsi reveal that Odinga signed a statement of understanding with racical Islamist elements in Kenya agreeing that if the Islamists would support Odinga that he would expand sharia law in Kenya. Odinga also exploited tribal hatreds and called for his supporters to claim voter fraud and resort to armed violence if Odinga lost at the polls. People who were close to Odinga and abandoned him after his embrace of violent tactics and partnership with Islamists inform Mr. Corsi that Barack Obama has seen the revelant documents and is fully aware of Odinga's plans and associations.

It would seem that Mr. Obama is not content to simply sit down and meet with dictators without preconditions. Rather it seems that he wants to join their campaign staff and help them in their rise to power.

This should come as no surprise to anyone since the one consistent thread which weaves through Obama's entire political life is a natural attraction to the most radical anti-American, anti-freedom, anti-Western civilization elements that he can find.

Given the outraged shrieks of protest from the Obama campaign (and its unofficial auxiliary in the mainstream media) the attacks on Obama's associations are paying off. We have already seen the Obama campaign pull out the left's last desperate defense against a truthful accusation - that of calling the accuser racist, sexist, anti-poor or homophobic.

As the Marine general once said, "when you find that you've kicked the enemy where it hurts keep kicking".

One thing we Republicans need to remember, however, is that the case against Obama will not be made by John McCain, at least not with any force and not in the final presidential debate.

McCain for whatever reason, whether he believes that it will offend moderates or whether it violates his idea of and "honorable" campaign, will not climb down into the sewer which is Obama's natural habitat. He will follow the course which he has set for himself even if he knows that it will result in his defeat. He can do no other, it is simply the kind of person he is.

As Rush Limbaugh pointed out yesterday it is going to be up to us to drag McCain over the finish line - possibly kicking screaming out his denunciations of us and our tactics. And once he is in office it is going to be up to us to engage in nearly daily hand-to-hand combat against him and whatever menagerie of left-wing Democrats he packs his cabinet with (in order to prove his bi-partisanship, don't ya know) in order to limit the damage he can do to the nation and the party.

However this will be preferable to watching helplessly as president Obama and a Democrat congress restructure the nation, turning it into the kind of place that people like Bill Ayers and Jeremiah Wright dream of living in.