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Tuesday, July 8, 2008
Obama tries to make Georgia seem in play; it isn’t
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The presidential candidate of symbolism and empty phrases comes, symbolically, to a school in Cobb County on Tuesday to demonstrate that he attracts a crowd in a Republican county that’s commonly identified as “suburban.”
He will draw a crowd. Cobb, and especially areas north of I-20 to McEachern High School, where Barack Obama is scheduled, are drifting solidly Democratic. As with Obama’s decision to go to St. Paul, Minn., the site of this year’s Republican convention, to declare himself the Democratic nominee, it is all about symbolism.
The symbolic message here is that Georgia is in play.
Fat chance.
If Obama wins Georgia, he’ll occupy the White House.
He won’t, despite the surge in registration and the enthusiasm he engenders among Democrats.
Obama’s coming here despite the fact that Sen. John McCain’s leading by 10 percentage points in the latest poll, said U.S. Sen. Johnny Isakson on Monday, because “obviously there are problems in Pennsylvania and Ohio.” Republicans are starting a television blitz in those two states and in Michigan and Wisconsin, other battleground states, pointing out that on energy, he has no new ideas or solutions.
The Rasmussen poll that Isakson cited “shoots holes in the rhetoric that Georgia is in play,” he said. “They realize how solid the South has been in the Republican corner since 1992, and they’d like nothing else than to crack a Southern state.”
By campaigning in a county routinely identified as solidly red —- and that does still have a Republican majority, though it’s shrinking, as it is in other counties close to Atlanta —- Obama makes a statement that he intends to challenge the GOP in the South. That would force McCain to campaign here, since he cannot afford to lose a single state in the region.
U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, who is on the ballot for a second term this year, said Obama is drawn to Georgia both to raise money and because more Democrats than Republicans voted in the state’s presidential primary. Chambliss noted that Obama has routinely supported higher taxes. The higher capital gains taxes Obama supports would have affected 600,000 Georgians in the 2006 tax year, he said, while raising the payroll tax to fund Social Security, as Obama suggests, would have hit 800,000 small business owners in the state, Chambliss said. “Tough economic times is not the time to talk about raising taxes,” he said.
Unless McCain finds a way to alienate those who would otherwise support him —- that is always possible —- Obama’s positions on taxes, his desire to substantially grow government, his opposition to exploration for new domestic supplies of oil and worries about his national security credentials make him unelectable in Georgia.
For core supporters none of that matters. His eloquence, coupled with a promise to represent change, as every individual defines it, is sufficient. They cannot be shaken. Inconsistencies don’t matter. Facts of his inexperience don’t, nor do exaggerations, claiming, for example, that he passed legislation where he was actually a bit player.
But as Georgians come to know his record —- something Chambliss and Isakson are attempting to help McCain highlight —- they’ll peel away. Georgians are occasionally surprised by the leftward drift of politicians they elect, but they do not knowingly choose candidates with the ideological bent of Barack Obama.
So welcome to McEachern. Welcome to Cobb County.
Both will serve their purpose of providing a backdrop for a message.
It is for show, a symbolic incursion onto Republican turf, where he will be cheered wildly and long.
But that is all that will come of it.
He cannot win Georgia. Nohow, no way.
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