Why is that?
First of all, don't get cocky. This election is far from a walk. We have to keep on working harder and harder. As Obama said, we all need to "Run through the Tape", finish strong and remember New Hampshire.
That said, John McCain, like most informed Republicans, is expecting a loss in November. He reads polls. His advisors read polls. Republicans in Congress read polls. All indications are pointing towards an Obama win with expanded Democratic majorities in the House and Senate.
John McCain has worked very hard to mainstream the idea that Barack Obama works with terrorists...
His campaign is engineering the entirely false belief among irate and increasingly desperate lower income and less-educated social conservatives that, through the Housing and Community Development Act, people of color were responsible for the global financial crisis. McCain is promoting the lie that Obama is a welfare state socialist. Moreover, McCain is engineering an impotent rage against the myth of a stolen election. A desperate and likely illegal coordinated assault against ACORN is highly suspicious. It is stoking the social conservative base to action before the election and will drive them to increased feelings of resentment and spiraling victimization after the impending loss.
Scapegoating is effective politics, but we also know of the dark territory to which those politics lead. Republican strategists have used the politics of fear, victimization, and hate to keep working families separated and weak since time immemorial. Middle-class people of all creeds, regions and colors can work together to solve the problems we face, but together they will keep Republicans out of power for a generation or more. In order to reduce their time in the wilderness, McCain's advisers must continue to keep working people at each other's throats. The McCain campaign seems to have settled on a strategy of fomenting rage among the social conservatives, hatred against those who "aren't like" them.
McCain Republicans cannot be allowed to divide the nation like this. We have too many important issues ahead of us. There is an important progressive agenda ahead of us. We need a responsible agenda that will allow us to recover from the Bush Depression, the worst strategic blunder in American military history and all of monstrous disasters wrought by the abject failure of ideological conservatism.
Progressives must champion the cause of all working families, rural and urban, across age, gender and race, and must enact policies that specifically protect the pocketbook issues and opportunities of those social conservatives who are now being so inflamed by McCain's dog whistle politics. Along with the traditional progressive base of women, college grads, multicultural voters, union workers, and urban voters, we must lift up those same social conservatives who have been trained to hate us with such fervor, so that Republicans can't abuse them through fear anymore.
It may take a generation or more to dissipate the hate that the McCain campaign and its ideological predecessors have stoked among social conservatives. Rapid passage and effective enactment of the Obama agenda nationwide for the benefit of all working families may be the key to maintaining an enduring progressive majority and saving social conservatives from themselves.