Sarah Palin Hits Obama Below the Belt

Sarah Palin throws a low “immoral” blow at Obama. Republicans are ready to pull out all the stops.

According to the math, the last month of the campaign no longer appears comfortable for the Democratic candidate Barack Obama: the average of likely voters as of this Saturday was 49.3% compared to 43.4% for John McCain, his Republican rival.

A look at less conventional polling, carried out over cyberspace, confirms this supremacy: on MySpace, supporters of Obama dominate 45 out of 50 states in the American union; on Facebook, Obama counts 1.9 million supporters (against 555,000 for McCain) and the videos Obama posted on You Tube have been viewed repeatedly by 16.6 million people, ten times more than those of his opponent.

The passion for the young senator from Chicago seems to have a positive impact on the American democratic process: while the level of participation in the American presidential election has shifted between 54 to 61 % over the last thirty years, experts like Doug Chapin from the Pew Research Center expect that number to be 80 or even 90% in certain states. If the United States counted 201 million potential voters in 2006 and if real participation in 2004 was 126 million voters ( a very good 63.8%), analysts this time expect to see a record turnout of 130 million voters.

In certain states, even the nature of the electorate is undergoing change. Thus, in the traditionally Republican eastern part of Virginia, 250,000 new voters have been counted and the polls are leaning towards the Democratic candidate.

Since he can’t stop a ripple of this magnitude without some strategy, the Republican candidate focuses on the essential. Is his drop in popularity so great that he can’t get a leg up in Michigan (mid-west)? He throws in the towel without hesitation. While he lags behind in a dozen states (Colorado, Florida, Indiana, Iowa, Missouri, New Mexico, Nevada, North Carolina, Ohio and now Virginia), he’s concentrating his efforts on the five states that Democrat John Kerry got in 2004: Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, New Hampshire and Maine.

The second televised debate between the two candidates will take place this Tuesday night in Nashville. Since the economic crisis has reared its head in the debate and has dragged down the Republican campaign, McCain’s supporters will do anything to divert the voters’ attention from now on . While Obama speaks of general access to health insurance and hopes to do away with the tax cuts granted by President Bush to incomes of more than 181,000 dollars a year, the Republican vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin, took what she read in the New York Times and got away on Saturday with accusing Obama of “palling around with terrorists.” In an article published the same day about the former activist and terrorist Bill Ayers who became a professor in Chicago, the New York paper in fact affirmed almost the inverse of what Palin suggested: Ayers and Obama “hadn’t been close. And Obama had never expressed sympathy for the radical views and actions of Mr. Ayers,” the Times wrote on Saturday.

The advantage of this badly delivered attack was to drive attention away from the economic and financial debate that’s dangerous for Republicans. And even for Mrs. Palin, to help people forget about another big disclosure: while she asserted again and again that she knew that people had gone through some difficult ends of month, she hasn’t be able to dispute having earned 166,495 and 196,531 gross dollars in 2006 and 2007 respectively, given that an average monthly gross income is about 10,350 euros a month. That’s without including the couple’s incomes, their home ownership, their eight investment funds and three retirement funds.

Mentioning Palin’s statements about the “terrorist friends” of Obama, the Senator of Missouri, Claire McCaskill, talked about “dishonest and immoral attacks.”, “It’s ridiculous.” But that will be the tone of the campaign as it dashes to the finish line.