Obama-Biden campaign leads with early voters

The Obama-Biden campaign today announced a very confident and committed position in the presidential election. With several million volunteers around the country. the Obama-Biden campaign manager, David Plouffe, said “we like what we’re seeing in all the states with the early vote.”

Today the campaign released two 30 second TV ads in Arizona, North Dakota and Georgia. Plouffe said that even though the McCain-Palin campaign has criticized the Obama-Biden campaign about heavy advertising, “the McCain spending levels this week have been quite high. In the Tampa market, they’re spending over 5,000 points of television, which may be the most amount of television ever bought in a political race.”

Through advertising, voter contact, and resources, Plouffe said he feels the Obama-Biden campaign is doing everything they need to do in the swing-states. Plouffe also said the campaign is organizing polling information at popular locations that youths hang out at in the swing states.

Plouffe said that in the tossup state of Nevada, 43% of democrats voting early are new or sporadic. In North Carolina, 19% of democrats voting early never voted in an election before. In Florida, 1/4 of sporadic voting democrats have voted early. Plouffe said the campaign is putting special focus on voters who recently committed to Obama, because they’re known as “sticky” and still vulnerable to vote for McCain. Even though the campaign feels confident in their state of the race, Plouffe said this does not take away from “the fierce urgency of trying to win Colorado, New Mexico, Virginia, Florida, and Ohio.”

Will Social Security suffer under an Obama-Biden administration?

The McCain-Palin campaign says the Obama-Biden campaign’s tax plan will have a downward effect on Social Security solvency by giving Americans credit for their payroll tax liability. The campaign’s Senior Policy Adviser Doug Holtz-Eakin said the Obama campaign plans to relieve Americans of payroll taxes, and by doing would “rob Social Security indirectly,” because payroll taxes finance social security, as well as medicare.

Former U.S. Senator Dan Coats (R-Ind.) said, “The rhetoric and record of Barack Obama clearly supports higher taxes and more spending...At a time of financial crisis that we’re all going through right now, the idea of raising taxes is counter to what virtually every economist who has ever written, or studied, or analyzed the situation would recommend. You don’t raise taxes in a fiscal downturn”. Holtz-Eakin explained that the impact of raising taxes hurts small businesses first, who generate “80 to 90 percent of new jobs in America.”

Former Senator Coats added that another one of the main differences between the McCain-Palin campaign and the Obama-Biden campaign is that McCain supports the use of coal in the mid-west, where Coats says there are abundant coal resources and new clean coal technologies.

The economy, the war, the big election issues

"I think Obama would like to do a Kennedy," said John Mueller, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies and Professor of Political Science at Ohio State University said during a panelist debate at the Brooking Institute. The panel analyzed the essential aspects that will determine who will be the president of the United States, focusing on the fundamentals--the economy and the war--and which one will play the biggest role in the 2008 election.

According to Mueller, the Iraq war is no longer the number one issue on the agenda. "What Americans want to talk about and think about is domestic," Mueller said that's why the economic crisis is going to play a big role in the election outcome. Mueller also said that Americans are still very supportive of the war in Afghanistan, saying as long as there is no bloodshed, no lives taken, no one would care if America stayed in Iraq several years more to come.

Ron Elving, Senior Washington Editor, National Public Radio went for a different angle, introducing a narrative perspective to of the election outcome. According to Elving, people don't want to know the truth nor the reality about the issues debated in the election, claming that the American people want a story. Elving highlighted that the traditional American voter will be affected by the stories surrounding the presidential candidates. "Which are the more compelling narratives for this election, is it McCain-Palin or is it Obama-Biden?" he said.