Jumping the gun?
It's one thing for polls to predict the winner on Tuesday, but a comic strip?
Newspapers are figuring out what to do with "Doonesbury" installments next week that assume Barack Obama wins, according to emails circulating through the American Association of Sunday & Features Editors.
Universal Press Syndicate, which sends "Doonesbury" to nearly 1,400 newspapers, is offering a strip from August for those who don't want to go out on that limb.
The Wednesday strip shows three soldiers watching TV and reacting to this announcement: "And it's official -- Barack Obama has won ... Making him the first African-American president in history!"
"Hoo-Ah!" one of the soldiers says. "Son of a gun! What a great, great day! We did it!" another soldier says.
"He's half-white, you know," says a white soldier. "You must be so proud," responds a soldier, who isn't white.
UPDATE: "Doonesbury" creator Garry Trudeau told the Associated Press that he might have provided a McCain option if the election were a toss-up. But, he said, at the time he drew the strip, poll analysts were giving McCain less than a 4 percent chance of winning and he "felt comfortable with the odds."
"The way I see it, if Obama wins, I'm in the flow and commenting on an extraordinary phenomenon," Trudeau said in an e-mail to the AP. "If he loses, there'll be such a national uproar that a blown call in a comic strip won't be much noticed. Besides, I'll be the one with the egg on my face -- not the editors."
This week, the strip has been riffing about the excitement over Obama in his father's homeland of Kenya. In today's installment, a man says, "You'll see my friend, if Obama wins, Africa will explode with joy."
"If McCain wins, we'll just return to our lives of quiet desperation," he adds.
UPDATE: On his blog, John Robinson, editor of the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., says that the strip for next Wednesday "is set in Iraq with his military characters sitting around a television as Obama is declared the next President of the United States."
Robinson says he doesn't understand the concern that it's too risky for newspapers, writing: "I'm thinking that if McCain wins, the embarrassment is Trudeau's, not ours. Isn't there anyone who doesn't think he's liberal? Besides, if McCain does win, just imagine how much fun it will be to watch how Trudeau handles the turnabout."
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US Military prefers McCain over Obama 3-1
That's why he is losing, GI fool...
This guy is so full of crappola......there is no CHANGE coming! He has fooled all of you koolaid drinkers! And talk about hubris (see ending).
10/31/08
By Tim Reid, The Times of London
Barack Obama's senior advisers have drawn up plans to lower expectations for his presidency if he wins next week's election, amid concerns that many of his euphoric supporters are harboring unrealistic hopes of what he can achieve.
The sudden financial crisis and the prospect of a deep and painful recession have increased the urgency inside the Obama team to bring people down to earth, after a campaign in which his soaring rhetoric and promises of "hope" and "change" are now confronted with the reality of a stricken economy.
One senior adviser told The Times that the first few weeks of the transition, immediately after the election, were critical, "so there's not a vast mood swing from exhilaration and euphoria to despair."
The aide said that Obama himself was the first to realize that expectations risked being inflated.
In an interview with a Colorado radio station, Obama appeared to be engaged already in expectation lowering. Asked about his goals for the first hundred days, he said he would need more time to tackle such big and costly issues as health care reform, global warming and Iraq.
"The first hundred days is going to be important, but it's probably going to be the first thousand days that makes the difference," he said. He has also been reminding crowds in recent days how "hard" it will be to achieve his goals, and that it will take time.
"I won't stand here and pretend that any of this will be easy -- especially now," Obama told a rally in Sarasota, Florida, yesterday, citing "the cost of this economic crisis, and the cost of the war in Iraq." Obama's transition team is headed by John Podesta, a Washington veteran and a former chief-of-staff to Bill Clinton. He has spent months overseeing a virtual Democratic government-in-exile to plan a smooth transition should Obama emerge victorious next week.
The plans are so far advanced that an Obama Cabinet has been largely decided upon, with the expectation that most of his senior appointments could be announced shortly after election day.
No tricks just taxes:
I'll give you 20:1 on Obama doing something in the first 1000 days vs McCain balancing the budget in four years. Name your price. As for planning for victory? It's what good leaders do in politics and business. If McCain wins, he will try to patch something together during the holidays, and I am sure it will make as much sense as picking Palin did.
BTW: I just spent the afternoon manning the phones, lobbying for Obama in Ohio. It was a much easier job than I expected.
And what is the difference between 1000 days and 4 years?
#4 - the difference is approximately 1 year and 3 months.
If Obama loses, then the comic is sarcastic. I don't see any problems.