I am not a crook

Dear readers, I can’t quit you! Even if I’m not blogging anymore—and I think I’m pretty much done—I can’t help but weigh in.

I’ve repeatedly told you all that I’m not a politico, that I got swept up in this campaign during my years’-long casual study of the relationship between the media and the culture (for lack of a better term). Proof that I’m no expert is easy to come by in my archives. I predicted that this race would be between Hillary and Rudy! I also became convinced at some point that the election would be about competence (because Bush has been so extraordinarily incompetent; that’s the biggest rap against him with “ordinary folks,” not his alleged malevolence, which those misguided souls and Dem partisans afflicted with Bush Derangement Syndrome accuse him of).

Anyhow, here’s how things look to me now. (Please note that I don’t analyze polls or electoral maps, though I do look at some of poll results.)

The MSM long ago called it for Obama-Biden. I beg to differ. The race is tightening.

The nine-point edge Obama currently holds as the candidate more trusted to handle the economy is half what it was in the middle of last week when he was up 56 to 38 percent and lags behind his post-convention average of 13 points. The decline has been most pronounced among whites with household incomes below $50,000.

A week ago, Obama held a 17-point lead on handling the economy among this group (54 to 37 percent), now, 49 percent prefer McCain, 46 percent Obama.

We’re a week out, and there has already been a stunning shift toward McCain in the attitude of Dame Hillary Rodham Clinton’s primary voters (the bitter gun- and religion-clingers aka poor rural whites).

I expect they will vote for McCain, and I also expect that there are a lot more like them out there, who haven’t come forward to express themselves to pollsters or to their colleagues or to reporters—especially reporters who claim to seek the truth but look for it in the funniest places (see, for example, Errol Morris’s admirable effort to show that “registered Republicans, Independents or switch-voters [are] planning to vote for Obama. People in the middle.”), namely: among self-selected Obama supporters who offer themselves up as case studies.

What about the people in the middle who support McCain? Where are the reports about them? More specifically, where are the reports about them that don’t suggest that they are racists and rednecks and bitter gun- and religion-clingers?

Well, we don’t read reports about McCain supporters who have honorable and noble and legitimate reasons for preferring their candidate. But that doesn’t mean that those people aren’t out there.

My point, and I do have one, is this. If Obama loses, it will be because he made a fundamental mistake by telling Joe the Plumber that he wanted to “spread the wealth.” And then he compounded it by repeating his opponents’ new charge against him:

FAYETTEVILLE, North Carolina (CNN) – Barack Obama fired back against charges his tax policy amounts to “socialism,” arguing John McCain simply wants to redistribute wealth to the already wealthy.

“It’s kind of hard to figure how Warren Buffet endorsed me, Colin Powell endorses me, and John McCain thinks I’m embracing socialism,” Obama said. “This is his argument because I want to give a tax cut to the middle class, because I want to give a tax cut to 95 percent of American workers.”

The Democratic nominee also said that while McCain may call giving regular Americans a tax break “socialism,” he calls it an “opportunity.”

The great Barack Obama—and he has run an extraordinary campaign—made a fatal, fundamental, elementary PR mistake: you never, ever repeat your opponents’ charge against you.

You never, ever use a one-word-fits-all negative description of yourself that has come out of your opponents’ mouth.

Is Barack Obama a socialist?
No, but he is driven by the need to deliver social justice to those who he believes have been unfairly left out of achieving the American dream.
And in these last two weeks, McCain has succeeded in making it sound like Obama wants to help the underprivileged at the expense of the privileged—which sounds okay until you start asking yourself: Is someone who makes $250K rich?

I don’t think so. And undecided voters have a week to think about that question … while the economic meltdown that propelled Obama to double-digit leads in the previous weeks proves to be much less than the disaster that was advertised.

There will be other twists and turns in this race, but if Obama goes down, it will be because of this massive self-inflicted wound, in which he accepted his opponent’s best argument about him—that he’s a tax-and-spend “liberal” regardless of the country’s economic condition—and scoffed at it, and tried to defend against it, instead of deflecting the charge via his usual jujitsu.

He thinks he’s right, and he sees only support around him, and he thinks he can do no wrong. It all reinforces his certainty.

The downfall? As always: hubris. You could look it up.