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John McCain is mounting his final stand not in Colorado, a state Bush won in 2004, but in Pennsylvania, which Kerry won comfortably and where Obama has a double digit lead. Why? One answer is that he's still hung up on Obama's apparent weakness among Appalachian whites. He can't get over the weaknesses Clinton appeared to expose in the primary campaign, and is gambling that racism will overwhelm party affiliation and economic distress. Weird bet. But another possibility, suggested by a New Republic reader, is that the Obama campaign has successfully faked McCain out:
Apparently McCain drew less than 500 people to a rally in suburban PA two days ago. Then he went to Western PA and flubbed the attack lines against John Murtha's comments so that the sound bite was completely incoherent. On Monday he drew crowds of about 2000, then 15 people at an airport rally (yes, that is correct--no zeros), and then his third rally of the day was described as "sparsely attended."[...]The Obama campaign is doing a major head fake in PA. They "accidentally" leaked an "internal" poll showing Obama up by only 2 percent in PA. I guarantee you that no such poll exists and that this was done both to motivate volunteers in the state (and maybe elsewhere) and prevent them from getting too complacent and also to sucker the McCain campaign into spending more time there. Ed Rendell has asked Obama to come back and campaign in the state-another major ruse. They know that McCain makes most of the decisions for his campaign and that they can goad him into spending more time in PA by pretending that it is close there. Let's see if Obama actually returns to PA before November 4th, but I sincerely doubt it. They are brilliant.It wouldn't shock me. For an idea of how weird the McCain campaign's decision is, here's the Pollster.com chart for Colorado, beginning on September 1st:And McCain, remember, is a Western Republican, long familiar to folks in Colorado by virtue of simple proximity to Arizona. Meanwhile, here's the same chart for Pennsylvania:Which looks more winnable to you?
