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Obama heading for victory...if all the polls are not wrong
As Barack Obama and Mitt Romney continue to stump frenetically to utilize every last hour of the remaining presidential election campaign, their most important message is about the importance of voting. And tomorrow, we will see how good the two campaign organizations really are in getting people to actually go to vote.
There is optimism in both camps, especially from the Obama campaign while the Romney’s campaign is “cautiously hopeful,” as Carl Cannon writes in RealClearPolitics today.
From the media, apart from Fox News, there is a steady message that Obama will win. Larry Sabato, the highly respected professor at the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics, joined this chorus today on his Crystal Ball blog. He predicted 290 electoral votes for Obama against 248 for Romney in that Obama would win in six of the nine swing states: Colorado, Iowa, Nevada, New Hampshire, Ohio and Wisconsin. So even if Romney would win in the other three, Virginia, North Carolina, and Florida, it will not enough to capture the necessary 270 electoral votes and win the election. Sabato also predicted continued Democratic majority in the Senate and continued Republican rule in the House of Representatives.
So if you believe all the polls and most of the pundits, president Obama will be reelected — if they are not all wrong, which is unlikely, but, perhaps, still possible.
Howard Kurtz, media critic at the Daily Beast:
“If Obama somehow manages to lose, it will be a stunning defeat for the nation’s first African-American president. But it will be overpriced a crushing blow for the punditocracy that headed into Election Day filled with confidence that Obama had it in the bag. And Fox News will not let the mainstream media hear the end of it.”
But let me remind you that not only the polls are on Obama’s side. History is also on his side, for it has proven extremely difficult to defeat a sitting president. That has only happened four times since 1912, when Woodrow Wilson defeated William Howard Taft, 1932 when Franklin Roosevelt beat Herbert Hoover, 1980, when Ronald Reagan won over Jimmy Carter and 1992 when Bill Clinton defeated George HW Bush. Should Romney win tomorrow it will be something of a historical sensation.
The last week of campaigning has gone well for Barack Obama. He was strengthened politically in the wake of the tragedy of Hurricane Sandy, not least because Romney was forced to the sidelines, with no role, unable to conduct his election campaign. But Obama was also strengthened by the words of praise from Republicans like New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and former Secretary of State Colin Powell, as well as from the country perhaps leading independent voice, New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg.
The campaign somehow took a new direction and Obama got new wind in his sails. It may prove to be decisive tomorrow.
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A Swede's view from D.C.
Internationally renowned journalist Klas Bergman will on a continuous basis cover the 2012 U.S. election process from a Swedish American perspective. Born in Stockholm, Bergman spent most of his adult life outside Sweden, reporting from western and eastern Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., based in Washington, DC and working mainly for the Swedish daily Dagens Nyheter and the Christian Science Monitor.
His primary domicile has been America, ever since his early student days in California in the 1960s. He now lives in the Washington, DC area.
For more information on the columnist and communications specialist, see http://ksbergman.wordpress.com
Klas Bergman's second book, "Drömmarnas Land" is released in Sweden on Sept. 20. isbn 978 91 7331 515 9. 278 pages, hard cover, in Swedish.
Carlsson Bokförlag.
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