In 2000, Al Gore got 29 percent of white voters who attended church weekly. Four years ago, John Kerry got an identical 29 percent of the same group. So, for the last four years Democrat strategists have worked at trying to peel off enough of those voters to swing a close election their way.

Today a Gallup poll puts support for Barack Obama among this group at . . . wait for it . . . 28%.

Excerpt:

No Democratic nominee in the modern day has made more of an effort to court religious voters than Obama. Jimmy Carter, a Southern evangelical, was the last Democrat to narrowly contest weekly church-going voters in a two-man race. But where Carter attempted to deemphasize his faith in the 1976 campaign, Obama has repeatedly returned to his faith to narrow the so-called God gap that has dogged Democrats for decades.
The party’s primary saw repeated and unprecedented events emphasizing faith, such as the Compassion Forum a little more than a week before the Pennsylvania vote. In the general election, in no less unprecedented form, the first event attended by the two candidates was not a presidential debate but a forum on religion and cultural politics at an evangelical megachurch.

Many will likely write the failure of these efforts off to latent racism among white Christians. But how then does one explain the fact that white guys Kerry and Gore got virtually identical margins? Of course, the real answer is, “It’s the ideology, stupid.” The old statist,  government-as-false-messiah policies of the past don’t suddenly become appealing just because Nancy Pelosi awkwardly uses some biblical language.

And if there were some Bush values voters out there who were considering switching sides, I suspect that seeing what Sarah Palin was subjected to put an end to that.

Of course, Barack Obama may not need any additional votes from this group this time around. And if this poll holds up, he won’t be getting them.

 Early on in this race, a lot of Americans, including some friends of mine, became enamored with with “idea” of an Obama presidency. As any good post-modern will tell you, narratives are everything, and the Obama narrative was über appealing. But here in the final hours before an election set in the most volatile global context since 1936, my hope is that moderate voters are taking a hard look at “President Obama” the reality.

The ever-brilliant Mark Steyn explores this theme here.  An excerpt:

The two-dimensional idea of President Obama is seductive: To elect a young black man of Kenyan extraction and Indonesian upbringing offers redemption both for America’s original sin (slavery) and for the more recent perceived sins of President Bush — his supposed enthusiasm for sticking it to foreigners generally, and the Muslim world in particular. And no, I’m not saying he’s Muslim. It’s worse than that: He’s a pasty-faced European — at least in his view of state power, welfare, and taxation. . .The problem is we’re not electing a symbol, a logo, a two-dimensional image. Long before he emerged on the national stage as Barack the Hope-Giver and Bringer of Change, there was a three-dimensional Barack Obama, a real man who lives in the real world. And that’s where the problem lies.

This was heartening. Some liberals are starting to express embarassment about the liberal media–particularly the network home of Keith Olbermann:

Both sides of aisle rip MSNBC

An excerpt:

 The cable news channel is “completely out of control,” said writer-producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason, a self-proclaimed liberal Democrat.

She added that she would prefer a lunch date with right-leaning Fox News star Sean Hannity over left-leaning MSNBC star Keith Olbermann.

Olbermann was criticized by many who attended Monday’s luncheon sponsored by the Caucus for Producers, Writers & Directors at the Beverly Hills Hotel. The event was dubbed “Hollywood, America and Election ’08.”

Bloodworth-Thomason and others seemed especially critical of the way MSNBC — and other media — has attacked Republican vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin while demeaning her supporters.

I was wondering if were any intellectually-honest feminists out there with the courage to denounce what Gov. Palin has been subjected to since being named McCain’s running mate. It’s good to know there is at least one.

Two very different writers. Two quotes. Very similar, timely messages.

Robert A. Heinlein:

The America of my time line is a laboratory example of what can happen to democracies, what has eventually happened to all perfect democracies throughout all histories. A perfect democracy, a “warm body” democracy in which every adult may vote and all votes count equally, has no internal feedback for self-correction…. [O]nce a state extends the franchise to every warm body, be he producer or parasite, that day marks the beginning of the end of the state. For when the plebs discover that they can vote themselves bread and circuses without limit and that the productive members of the body politic cannot stop them, they will do so, until the state bleeds to death, or in its weakened condition the state succumbs to an invader — the barbarians enter Rome.

C.S. Lewis:

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

(hat tip:  Andy McCarthy and Jonah Goldberg)

Went ahead and cast my vote today. Not that any of my favored candidates really needed my help. When you live in the reddest of cities in the reddest of counties in the reddest section of one of America’s reddest states–you don’t really get the feeling that your vote is making a huge difference. Votes in the primaries tend to be much more meaningful.

Female Offspring Unit #1 cast her very first vote today. That’s a significant milestone. I have it on good authority that she voted well.

I remember my very first presidential vote. It was for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and I was thrilled to cast it. My vote today didn’t feel like that one. It felt more like my vote for Bob Dole in 1996. The difference being, Republicans had taken control of Congress in 1994, the Internet bubble economy was rocking along nicely, and the prospect of a second Clinton term wasn’t remotely as troubling as the thought of an Obama presidency.

Today, the Senate and House are in the hands of irresponsible know-nothings. The world economy is teetering on the edge of a precipice. The Russians and the Chinese are actively making trouble for the U.S. all over world. And today a responsible source in Israel says the Iranians are considering a preemptive strike on Israel.

Today my daughter may have cast her first vote in the most important U.S. election since 1860.

That’s a phrase NRO’s election guru, Jim Geraghty, uses to describe the reaction he gets from liberal readers every time he mentions a poll that shows McCain gaining ground on Obama.

And yet some liberal readers are driven into a fury each time I point to something that suggests their guy might not win, or might not win by a landslide. And it’s clearly ratcheted up in recent days. . .So what’s going on here? These folks are who they are; I’m not expecting discourse beyond their usual “YOU SUCK” level. But why are they so bothered by one guy saying that a landslide isn’t inevitable? Why does “your guy might not win” send them into paroxysms of rage?

Of course, as reader Ted points out in a comment on a previous post, this is nothing compared to the eruption of molten fury that will take place if McCain is miraculously able to pull this out (and it will definitely have involved divine intervention if it happens.)

We’ve had a couple of months now of the media establishment assuring the nation that Obama is going to win–in part as a psychological effort to discourage and suppress potential McCain voters. We have a huge majority of the African-American population deeply emotionally invested in the Obama candidacy. We have eight years of frustration at two previous super-narrow losses.

All that, coupled with the fact that Obama has energized a segment of the American populous that is semi-deranged (remember the anarchist protesters that were throwing bleach on grandmothers at the Republian convention in St. Paul?) adds up to a swelling caldera that will blow the moment the election is called for McCain (if it goes that way.)

There will almost certainly be riots and looting in many of America’s major cities. (Heck, there’s rioting and looting in Detroit when the Pistons win the NBA championship.) When the national guard is called out to restore order and protect property, it will fulfill all the dark fantasies the left has been entertaining over the last few years about Bush the dictator. “We knew he was just looking for an excuse to declare martial law!” they’ll scream.

The disruptive and scarring claims of election fraud that followed the Bush victories in 2000 and 2004 will seem like a Teletubbies love-fest in compared to the blizzard of litigation that will follow such an outcome.

In other words, it will get very, very ugly.

Of course, if Obama wins as predicted, it will get ugly in a very different way.

Thus, it seems that no matter what happens in two weeks, it will be a good time to know that you are a child of God and that this fact makes you a citizen of another Kingdom–one that knows no boundaries and functions in a different economy.

Nevertheless, wisdom and prudence would suggest that you may not want to be in the middle of a major city on election night. Just in case.

These are on back-order at Costco . . .

 I saw an astonishing little aside buried in a Wall Street Journal article about American Express. The article, headlined Delinquencies Mount for American Express, centered on how Amex has paid a price for being lured into the formerly-lucrative revolving charge business.

But the thing that caught my attention was this bit in the middle of the piece:

For example, AmEx recently slapped a $1,100-a-month spending limit on John and Monica Bell’s platinum AmEx charge card. The reason: AmEx customers who pay with plastic at the same places where Mrs. Bell shops and have the same mortgage lender have poor repayment histories, according to a letter sent by AmEx.

“They’re holding me accountable for someone else’s credit,” fumes Mr. Bell, a real-estate agent in Chadds Ford, Pa. His mortgage loan came from Countrywide Financial Corp., now part of Bank of America, and his wife uses the AmEx card at retailers Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and the Marshalls unit of TJX Cos. and to fill up her tank at Sunoco Inc. gas stations.

The couple runs up about $5,000 a month on the card, which previously had no limit, and always pays on time, Mr. Bell says.

Just so you’re clear on the details here . . .  The couple has an American Express Platinum card which they consistently put about $5k a month on, and always pay the full balance on time. But because they occasionally use the card at a local Walmart and Marshall’s, and buy cheap gas, Amex has capped this couple’s monthly use at $1,100.

Why? Because that fits a pattern a computer has identified as being statistically more prone to default–even though they’re never late. I guess you could call this “financial profiling.”

So, the next time you see an Amex commercial that touts “no monthly spending limit,” make a mental note–“Unless you’re a discount shopper.”

This is just one of several indicators I’ve observed recently that the entire corporate world is very, very nervous right now. And this story points up how a recession in the information age might play out differently than any we’ve had in the past.

At the end of a gloomy post last week about McCain’s chances, I wrote:

If the markets stabilize this coming week AND gas prices continue to come down AND some other unforeseen event actually works to McCain’s benefit (for a change)–the race could tighten back up.

Well, the first two of those conditions seem to have been met. And according to several polls, McCain has indeed gotten much more competitive. Today Zogby has McCain down by less than 3 points. If there is any degree of Wilder Effect at all, the race could be a dead heat.

But you wouldn’t know that by watching or reading the mainstream media. “It’s all over.” “It’s Obama by a landslide.” “Why bother with an expensive election, let’s just declare Obama President by acclamation.”

This is the dominant meme in the press. And it’s being put forth for a reason. The hope is to dishearten those who aren’t so much voting for McCain as against Obama (people like me, in other words)  so they won’t bother to vote. This is known as an attempt at voter suppression.

Barring any additional big, momentum shifting event, I think the race now hinges on two unknown factors.  How big will the Wilder Effect be among independents who have told pollsters they are voting for Obama; and how successful will the Dems voter fraud efforts be through organizations like ACORN.

The second factor is potentially huge. It is now universally known that in 1960, Joseph Kennedy used money to generate voter fraud to put his son over the top in a super-close election. The location of that election-buying crime?  Why, Barack Obama’s home base of Chicago, of course–America’s headquarters for crooked politicians and dead voters.

At The Witherspoon Institute’s site, Robert George writes:

Sen. Barack Obama’s views on life issues ranging from abortion to embryonic stem cell research mark him as not merely a pro-choice politician, but rather as the most extreme pro-abortion candidate to have ever run on a major party ticket.

Barack Obama is the most extreme pro-abortion candidate ever to seek the office of President of the United States. He is the most extreme pro-abortion member of the United States Senate. Indeed, he is the most extreme pro-abortion legislator ever to serve in either house of the United States Congress.

Read the whole thing here.