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Endgame: Sestak Pulls Ahead
Team Specter better have a devastating commercial ready.
Muhlenberg/Morning Call tracking polls released both Saturday and Sunday showed Sestak ahead. That’s news. What’s shocking is what the polls show behind those up-front numbers.
*Sestak gained two points between Saturday and Sunday, going from 44 percent to 46 percent, while Specter remained at 42 percent both days.
*In the past week, Specter’s favorables have gone from 58 percent to 50 percent amongst Pennsylvanians.
*In that same time, Sestak’s favorables have risen from 45 percent to 52 percent.
*Specter’s unfavorables have risen five points, while Sestak’s have risen just one.
In that time, here’s what happened:
The public had time to reflect on last Saturday’s bitter debate between the Democrats. During that debate, Sestak took on Specter’s attack ad against him, which questions his naval service. He did so, as usual, with a smile on his face next to the older, angrier Specter, who demanded an apology for Sestak’s criticism of the ad. Sestak also helped remind the crowd that Specter was a Republican during the Bush years and therefore played a part in the bubblegum that the economy produced, popped and chewed during that time.
Sestak, meanwhile, had been playing his own ad, a one-minute spot in which he introduces himself and explains his backing of the government’s new health-care regulations.
On Wednesday, Sestak released a second ad, detailed and available to watch on this blog. It features Bush and Palin alongside Specter in a different time, when Arlen was a Republican. If you want to remember why our former president’s approval ratings hung around the high 20s/low 30s for three years, you need look no further than that ad. What a creep that guy was! And, luckily for Sestak, he was a creep with Specter at his side on more than just an occasion.
Conservative websites, pundits and Internet commenters love sarcastically mentioning how the left is still attacking Bush and linking current politicians to our former disgraced president. We believe they do this in order to make liberals think twice before releasing that Bush-related ad or mocking W. in speeches and such—because that tactic works.
George W. Bush failed miserably at every turn of the presidency. His first controversial election was supplemented by a re-election campaign based around telling Americans they were going to be exploded if he weren’t kept in office. A caricature of the comedy based upon him, he loosened banking and lending regulations then watched the entire economy come tumbling down with just months before the end of his presidency. Around every turn—the morning of 9/11, Hurricane Katrina, the American economy's October 2008 demise—he hadn’t a clue what to do.
America is slowly crawling its way out of the urinal because of the ineptness of our former president. His needless wars are still being fought. And what’s unfortunate about the vast majority of the voting public is that these trends in history can sometimes be forgotten, especially as W. has rarely been seen in public since completing his hateful rule. In spite of the right-wing media’s rhetoric regarding Barack Obama’s Eisenhower-lite socialism, Barack Obama is more or less doing what needs to be done to clean up after eight years of misery that was fully-enabled—through both rhetoric and votes—by Pennsylvania’s senior senator.
Sestak made the right choice in bringing W. into the equation and he’s got the numbers to show for it.
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