Is it 1980 or 1968?

With Barack Obama's recent surge in national polls, several pundits are trying to decipher what the final electoral outcome will be. Some are saying that a landslide like Ronald Reagan's 489-49 Electoral College rout of Jimmy Carter in 1980 is a distinct possibility. Other's are cautioning that a closer election could still be in the cards. The 1968 nailbiter between Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey is often referenced. Humphrey came back from a deficit similar to McCain's current one to nearly defeat Nixon. Humphrey only lost by 0.7 percent in the popular vote, and the networks did not call the election until the Democrat lost Illinois by a little over 100,000 votes early the next morning.

Check out these two post-election analyses from 1968 and 1980.





I guess the safest thing to say is that technically it could go either way. Do I think it will? Not a chance. The night of November 4, 2008 will look more like November 4, 1980 than November 5, 1968.

As you'll hear Walter Cronkite and others discussing on the 1980 clip, the undecideds broke really late for Reagan. There was only one Presidential debate that the two candidates agreed on that year. It was held the week before and the outcome was devastating for Carter - it featured the famous Reagan line, "Are you better off today than you were four years ago?" The electorate shifted to Reagan over the weekend and ended up giving him nearly 51 percent of the vote. Carter received 41 percent, and Independent John Anderson received 6 percent.

According to the latest Gallup tracking poll, the Obama-McCain numbers are not that far off (51-42). With no third-party candidate enjoying nearly as much popularity as John Anderson, expect the undecideds to continue to steadily break to both candidates over the next three weeks. The reason I'm making this prediction is because so many of the political currents that framed the 1980 race have already occurred or been presented during the course of this campaign. In our media saturated environment, with an electorate that has seen both candidates on television or the internet perhaps twenty times more than they ever saw Ronald Reagan prior to the 1980 election, the process has simply been sped up a bit.

Could McCain stage a Humphrey like resurgence? Perhaps but not likely. Humphrey's resurgence came after he gave a speech harshly critical of LBJ's Vietnam War policies late in the campaign. I can't see McCain making a similar break.

Make no mistake - I'm not predicting that Obama will win by 440 electoral votes. The country is far too polarized for that, but he should win by a similar margin in the popular vote, and probably a comfortable 150-170 margin in the electoral college.

Who's Really Taking a Page From Jimmy Carter and George H.W. Bush? John McCain

Have you ever heard of the term, "All politics is local"? Well maybe "All politics is cyclical" is more appropriate in describing Election 2008.

Earlier this week, during a speech in Albuquerque, John McCain injected a new theme into the campaign that is sure to increasingly be his campaign's sole mantra as we get closer to election day. Here's the Republican nominee in his own words.

This is all part of the McCain campaign's attempts to "otherize" Barack Obama. According to New York Times columnist, Nicholas D. Kristof in a September 20 op-ed.

What is happening, I think, is this: religious prejudice is becoming a proxy for racial prejudice. In public at least, it’s not acceptable to express reservations about a candidate’s skin color, so discomfort about race is sublimated into concerns about whether Mr. Obama is sufficiently Christian.

The result is this campaign to “otherize” Mr. Obama. Nobody needs to point out that he is black, but there’s a persistent effort to exaggerate other differences, to de-Americanize him.

The "differences" that are being referenced by McCain seem to lack specifics, but when put together into the whirlwind assault delivered in Albuquerque, McCain hits home the point that Obama is not one us. This in turn can be used to reinforce racial and religious stereotypes in voters' minds.

The "otherize" option seems desperate because it is. It's a hail mary pass, it's getting rid of the goalie, and a host of other sports analogies. Though whether it will work with a opposing candidate who is African-American remains to be seen, this tactic is not new. Case in point - this ad by Jimmy Carter from late in the 1980 campaign provided by the Museum of the Moving Image.



Or something similar from George H.W. Bush in 1992.



In both instances, the incumbent lost. They failed to sufficiently otherize their challenger. Obama actually enters mid-October in a better polling position than both Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton did. The key difference is that Reagan and Clinton only had to deal with the possibility of being otherized because of their policy positions or lack of consistency, not because of their ethnic backgrounds.