The general election: Here we come?
Posted: Thursday, May 08, 2008 9:09 AM by Mark Murray
The Wall Street Journal: "So confident are Obama supporters in Congress that some have begun talking of his convention acceptance speech this August. Sen. Obama first gained broad recognition for his keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, when he was seeking election to the U.S. Senate. As one Democrat noted, if Sen. Obama were nominated, his acceptance address would be the night of Aug. 28 -- the 45th anniversary of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King's ‘I Have A Dream’ speech."
The WSJ also takes a look at non-traditional swing states, like North Carolina.
Time's Joe Klein: "A general-election campaign between John McCain and Barack Obama doesn't need any hype. It won't be boring. The question is whether we, politicians and press alike, will grant this election — and electorate — the respect that it deserves."
The New York Times notes the GOP is treating Obama as the Dem nominee. "Officials in the McCain campaign and at the Republican National Committee say that they have not counted Mrs. Clinton out, but some Republicans say that the outcome is clear. ‘Right now Hillary Clinton may not be able to do the math, but Republicans have been for the last couple of weeks,’ said Kevin Madden, a Republican consultant who worked on Mitt Romney’s campaign this year.”
“Some of the issues that Republicans are beginning to raise paint a picture of what the fall election strategy against Mr. Obama might look like. Some are traditional, using Mr. Obama’s support for withdrawing the troops from Iraq to portray him as weak on national security and his opposition to suspending the federal gas tax this summer to show him as a tax-and-spend Democrat… Another line of attack seems to be squarely directed at independent and swing voters, whom both the McCain and Obama campaigns have been courting. The McCain campaign has argued that Mr. Obama lacks a record of bipartisan achievement to back up his calls for healing partisan rifts in Washington and getting things done. That issue was underscored this week when, in a speech on the judiciary, Mr. McCain contrasted his own willingness to vote for President Bill Clinton’s judicial nominees with Mr. Obama’s votes against President Bush’s judicial nominees, including Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr."
The DNC has released a memo boasting about the turnout at all of this year’s Democratic contests. “During this election season nearly 35 million people have come out to support our Democratic candidates, and an estimated 3.5 million new voters have been added to the national voter rolls,” the memo reads. “From 2004 to 2008, for all states for which comparable data was available, Democratic turnout increased by significant margins—no state saw a decrease for Democrats and many states saw turnout increasing by thousands of percentage points. Turnout increases ranged from 18 percent in Arkansas to an astronomical 2,549 percent in Kansas.”
More: “In contrast, comparing 2008 Republican turnout to the last contested Republican primary in 2000, Republican turnout either stayed relatively stagnant or decreased. Sinking turnout throughout the country for Republicans shows the contrast between Democrats and Republicans this primary season. In fact, for the 30 states for which comparable data is available, 27 of them saw more Democratic than Republican voters this year.”
