Why President-elect Obama won

Even more than a week after the election, nobody seems to be expressing the following points, so maybe the opinions are off the mark. I don’t think so, and I approve this message.

Barack Obama won for five main reasons. There might be 100 more but even the most significant of them only could come in at Number Six.

Here are the five main reasons, about which I will comment at length below: 1) The Media. Everybody can dance around that, but the media represent a highly powerful engine and serve to scare the daylights out of politicians while, with prejudice, sway the thinking of millions.

2) Bush hatred. Let us assume for the moment you don’t need an immediate further explanation for this.

3) The third reason Obama won was, no question about it, Senator John McCain.

4) For Reason Number Four, I copy Rush Limbaugh’s major point, the failure of the Republicans to be conservatives, and let the world know it. I am paraphrasing Rush but I think that’s close to what he said right after Election Day.

5) Reason Number Five is not overkill. It umbrellas a great deal. President-elect Obama knew how to deliver a manuscript speech from a Teleprompter. HIs first news conference after election last week confirms this point when Obama, at the brief news conference, demonstrated he is no master of the ad-lib.

As acknowledged above, there are other reasons that led to the Obama victory. But remember that more than 58,000,000 people voted for McCain, so the 7% difference in votes was anything but a landslide. It also bodes well for the opposition party four years from now if the GOP can wake up from its collective slumbers and blunders. In fact, it bodes well for the GOP in 2010 when the next House of Representatives races come up.

It is not my intention to try to list all the factors identifying victory and defeat. Blacks voted almost entirely for Obama. Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin drew many voters to McCain who otherwise might have stayed home on Election Day. She was much more effective than the media are admitting, yet she likely turned away some so-called “moderates” due to the disgraceful trashing she suffered. And so on. Victory has many fathers; defeat is an orphan.

So, back to Reason Number One. Many people in and out of politics do not want to give credit to the ability of the media to control this society. Such people are fooling themselves, but they are falling for the media feints. The media collectively did not just favor Obama; they were in the bag for Obama. They shamelessly bulldozed their biased support. It is a national disgrace and will not be corrected unless or until the people in journalism call cop.

As a generalization, the people in journalism mostly are liberals. That goes double for the educators in college schools of journalism. Generally, they are quite comfortable in their skins. Yet much of their work is journalistic fraud, an abrupt rejection of the Journalist’s Creed, which says “the supreme test of good journalism is the measure of its public service”.

If there was news favorable to Obama, it got front-page above-the-fold treatment. If there was a favorable McCain story, it was elsewhere in the paper. If there was a negative Obama story, you often only heard about it on the Fox News Channel. The so-called “Mainstream Media” ignored it, or countered it with bogus angles or otherwise “buried” it.

Deborah Howell in the Washington Post Sunday said stories and photos about Obama in the news pages outnumbered those devoted to McCain. Reporters, photographers and editors found the Obama candidacy more newsworthy and historic. For example, the op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32. The number of Obama stories during the past year, going back to last November, was 946, compared with McCain’s 786. After Obama eliminated Hillary Clinton, the tally was 626 stories on Obama, 584 on McCain. Obama was on the front page 176 times, McCain 144. This was just the Washington Post. While we have no comparable statistics, it is pretty safe to say that most newspapers’ coverages would reveal the same percentages of biases.

The Project for Excellence in Journalism found that from June 9 to November 2, two-thirds of the campaign stories in the national media were about Obama, 53 per cent were about McCain. (Of course, some stories were about both candidates.)

You will find elsewhere on this blog that I do not admire Katie Couric. She has enjoyed a kind of rebirth for her interview in September with Sarah Palin. What a joke. Katie interviewed Palin for two hours and aired just six minutes. Anybody could interview Katie Couric for two hours and clobber her. Couric’s questions were described as fair by the Mainstream Media. Several of those CBS-TV aired were not fair. One was when she asked Palin to list several of the U-S Supreme Court rulings she disagreed with. When the question was aired, I did a double-take, trying to think of even one Supreme Court ruling besides Roe vs. Wade.

I would like to ask Katie to name the last three years’ winners of Movie of the Year. After all, she was star of the TODAY show and should have broad knowledge of news. I would like to ask Katie to name the new President of Russia. She may know now it is Dmitry Medvedev, but “I betcha” she couldn’t have told you three months after he became President. I would like to ask Katie to name the Prime Minister of Canada. Even today. It’s Stephen Harper, Katie. But believe me, in interviewing Katie for two hours, my training would enable me to “sandbag” her in the fashion of the Mainstream Media, including Katie. While it would not be good journalism, it would be revealing. For that matter, Katie interviewed Palin after the Alaskan Governor had been a national candidate for less than a month. Katie would have been easy prey to question a month after she switched to CBS-TV.

Below the radar in the subject of the media, consider the way certain stories become recycled to promote liberal causes. One day I recall USA Today running its top story on an upturn in homeless numbers (the numbers themselves were comparatively insignifcant and would have been ignored with a Democrat in the White House) and across the page was a story about a slump in car sales. Right now the Big Three automakers are in big financial trouble, but do you know the “stimulus package” Obama promoted at his first post-election news conference could be correctly identified as a UAW bailout. The auto workers’ unions exercised their extreme power to achieve wonderful union contracts that cost the Big Three $72 per hour. It takes a lot of dollars to buy a car built by $72 per hour workers. It also costs more than $1,500 in the price of a new car to pay the worker his or her hospitalization costs. Foreign cars have much less in the price for employee medical benefits. For example, Toyota cars have $110 for employee hospitalization.

So when we talk about the Big Three, there is a lot to the story you may not be told. There were similar omissions in the recent political campaign coverage. You were fed liberal viewpoints but rarely conservative ones. And the weight applied almost always leaned toward Obama.

The second reason for the Obama victory, Bush hatred, was an overwhelmingly successful effort by (Reason Number One) the liberal media. President Bush did not receive objective reporting out of the White House and he was not shown the respect the office calls for.

For example, in San Francisco, 12,000 people signed a petition in support of a proposition on a local ballot to rename an Oceanside sewage plant after George W. Bush. Classless disrespect.

President Bush endured relentless attacks from the left while concurrently having to see conservatives abandon him.

I did not like everything Mr. Bush did during the past nearly eight years. I thought he should have responded to the opposition diatribes. He thought it would demean the office of the Presidency.

Unlike most Americans who opposed the war in Iraq, I support him. I have heard nobody on either side, really, observe that the Presidential campaign among Democrat Party candidates listed Iraq as the Number One issue. But that was more than a year ago. It hardly came up as an issue during the final two months of the campaign, thanks to the tanking economic news. The fact remains that Al Queda and similar enemies did not repeat the destruction of 9/11 because, frankly, they were afraid of George Bush.

But taken as a whole, no matter what Mr. Bush has done, he was blamed for everything. He remains despised by liberals while continuously disappointing the right, even though it should seem obvious that many of our nation’s current problems either existed long before Mr. Bush came to office, or are beyond his control.

Ironically, Obama will not suffer in the same disgraceful way. Attacks against Obama as President may sometimes be cruel and slanderous, similar to those against George Bush. But Obama will escape the same barrages because he will enjoy the fawning of a favorable liberally-biased media. Just as during the campaign, the media will serve to protect their chosen one.

Investigative reporter Jeffrey Scott Shapiro in the Wall Street Journal said our failure to stand by the one person who continued to stand by us has not gone unnoticed by our enemies. It has shown to the world, he said, how disloyal we can be when our President needed loyalty — a shameful display of arrogance and weakness that will haunt this nation long after Mr. Bush has left the White House. It was juvenile; it was often virtually childish.

The media fed off Bush hatred and disseminated it, broadcast it regularly.

The third reason for the Obama victory waS Senator McCain himself. At times I wondered how he could be so unwise as to avoid obvious chances of scoring three-pointers against Obama. McCain could have clobbered Obama on many points, many issues. But he seemed more interested in getting Boy Scout merit badges for good behavior, which helped him not a whit. McCain could have campaigned on the immigraton issue, from a conservative viewpoint. Support legal immigration, oppose illegal immigration. Forget the fact that George Bush was weak on this. In fact, it would have demonstrated a key issue where he disagreed with the President. It would have challenged Obama’s campaign speech that with McCain, you get another George Bush.

McCain was politically less than astute to pull out of Michigan weeks before election day. What a terrible negative image that portrayed. It would have been much better had Sarah Palin not mentioned it, but it demonstrates how reckless the move was that Sarah Palin wanted to see the decision reversed. She just should not have said so pubicly. Obviously, McCain never discussed the move in advance with his running mate. (The only other Palin gaffe, by the way, was her reference to looking toward 2012.) She has to be careful when she speaks her mind. Comments like that do show inexperience, but Palin was one of McCain’s good decisions, and generally, conservatives thank McCain for selecting her. They won’t admit it but liberal media types feared Palin because she was so effective in defining liberalism.

And while we are beating up on John McCain, it is necessary to point out that his silence when there were negative stories did not make him look good. He needed to show some outrage when somebody asked him how many houses he owned. There were several ways he could have answered this that would have prevented the subject from showing up on the late night comedy shows.

And McCain was nothing short of stupid to alienate and ignore Rush Limbaugh.

Speaking of Rush, he described the fourth reason listed here for Obama’s victory. Rush put it at Number One. When you survey the American public, you find many people have more conservative viewpoints than THEY realize. Rush said the Republicans did not run on conservative issues, and this not only hurt them with conservatives but also denied them the opportunity to bring more voters into their camp. So Republicans need to recognize their conservative issues are far more powerful and universally appealing than they realize.

The fifth reason was the way Obama could appear impressive on the stump. He drew big crowds, thanks to extra efforts to attract audiences with rock shows, including that one in Berlin. He was especially effective in reading from a TelePrompter. He was not effective in ad lib situations, but even here, he is better than George Bush who became infamous for speech gaffes. The liberal media ignored Obama’s gaffes, such as when he made the reference to the nation’s 57 states, We don’t have 57 states, do we???

Jimmy Carter was a joke as President, and has continued to be the same as former President. It will be interesting to watch Obama to see if he can avoid becoming the remake of Jimmy Carter. Based on his liberal voting record in the U-S Senate and his leftist views and supporters, it will not be surprising if Obama mirrors Carter. Despite his fawning media, Obama will not have a cakewalk.

Ann Coulter put the status of Politics Twenty-First Century in focus by suggesting that Republicans show Obama the exact same kind of respect and loyalty that Democrats have shown “our recent Republican President”.