Senator John McCain, with ten days left in the Presidential campaign, has invoked the name of a Democratic President, Harry S Truman.
That means in translation that Senator McCain, in his heart and mind, has conceded the election to Senator Barack Obama. Every losing candidate for President, since Truman’s upset victory over Governor Thomas E Dewey in 1948, has brought up Truman as proof that a miracle is possible. Every candidate wants to believe that the polls will be totally wrong as they were in 1948. The difference is that polling is much more sophisticated and fine tuned when compared to the still new polling industry sixty years ago. One must realize that there are so many more polls now than back then, and the overwhelming indication is that the Election of 2008 will be decided much earlier than the elections of 2000 and 2004.
I have told my students that WHEN McCain brought up Truman, as he most assuredly would, that could be the signal to recognize that the election campaign was effectively over. It can now be said that moment has been reached! We are on the verge of electing our first African-American President, an amazing development when one considers the odds of that just four years ago when Barack Obama first came on the national scene with his rousing keynote address at the Democratic National Convention of 2004.Â
American politics continues to amaze, as who would have realistically thought four years out that Richard Nixon, Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton or George W. Bush would have won the Presidency? Trying to project that far ahead as to who would occupy the Oval Office has been an impossible task, and again, that reality is presenting itself as we finish the campaign of 2008!