Las Vegas Sun - Jon Ralston
In this swing state, on the most swinging streets in the world, national pollster Frank Luntz told Fox News on Friday night what turned out to be the survey consensus after the debate:
Standing in front of the Polo Towers on the Strip, Luntz revealed that a carefully chosen group of 30 undecided Southern Nevada voters “thought that Barack Obama did a little better” than John McCain. Polls for CNN and CBS News showed clear national margins for Obama, and here in Nevada, which Luntz said some people think “will determine the presidency,” McCain needed a lift to mitigate daunting Democratic registration gains and a resurgent Democratic Party organization.
After one of the worst fortnights in presidential campaign history, with his oscillations on the bailout and bizarre campaign suspension (except for all those ads and state organizations purring along), the fundamentals of McCain’s campaign are not sound.
What struck me amid the usual post-debate bloviating by the punditrocracy and the ridiculous ritual of partisans telling the media what to write about how wonderfully well their guy did (Lewis Carroll would have had a field day), the desperation to stop the hemorrhaging by the McCain campaign was manifest. No one watching that debate could have believed McCain scored a convincing victory (for the record, this bloviating pundit thought the Republican nominee had his moments but Obama was solid enough to achieve a draw).
But the McCain campaign immediately inundated my inbox with e-mail bursting with snippets of quotes from various journalists, implying they had declared McCain the victor (even Henry Kissinger sided with his friend, John McCain!).
The McCain campaign even played ventriloquist with McCain’s Nevada chairman, Lt. Gov. Brian Krolicki:
“This week John McCain once again demonstrated to Nevadans that the needs of our country are paramount to any political campaign. John McCain unilaterally suspended his campaign to devote all his energies on the economic crisis and tonight McCain demonstrated his unparalleled foreign policy credentials when compared to the naive and ill informed.”
Anyone think Krolicki thought of that after the debate? But I, like many Nevadans, thank him for telling me what to think...........
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