Washington Post Article
The presidential election is a race that all of America can bet on. We can show how confident we are that we’ve “bagged us a winner” by simply throwing our money like confetti in the wake of our respective nominees marching toward the winners circle or oval in this case. However, if you wagered more on your candidate does that mean you’ve increasing their chances of winning?
The 2008 presidential election between Senators John McCain and Barack Obama has become a spending spree for the ages. In a recently released diagnostic by the Wall Street Journal, the two nominees have managed to spend over a half a billion (685.3 million) on their combined campaigns. With Senator Obama way out spending Senator McCain. In fact, his over all expenses more than double those of the humbled John McCain. This combined total is already about the entire spending of 2000 presidential election and easily more than half of 2004.
Financial Spending for the last 3 Presidential Elections
“You’ve got to spend money to make money,” that’s what they’ve always said. Only neither of these two candidates are selling the American people anything other than themselves. If that’s the cases, then Obama must be about twice the worth of McCain right? And if so, his words and promises must be as well. Senator Obama has promised to turn this country around with no more “wasteful spending on obsolete federal government programs that make no financial sense.” Yet he feels that a necessary expenditure would be to market himself to the American people by nearly twice as often as his opponent. If his ideas were solid, then why would we need to hear them twice. Maybe it's because he's not telling them the first time? Does the man with less experience at dealing with financial problems but the more promises to fix them, deserve my money or more importantly my vote?
Where pray tell do we imagine Obama’s going to pay back all this barrowed money from? It certainly won’t be out of the pocket books of those rich, “fat-cat” republicans that refuse to throw their hard money behind McCain; will it? It’s not like they deserve it anyways.
In the last couple of months there has come a dramatic swing in McCain’s spending for his campaign. In a lot of ways it seems to be bringing him back from the brink of defeat and putting him back on his feet. Does this mean that you can buy your way into the white with someone else’s money or did McCain randomly just become more appealing to you too?
5 comments:
I feel that McCain is having to spend more money as the election is coming to a close, because he is facing a brick wall in the election. Because Obama is able to speak more clearly, not make fun of(like McCain in the presidential election against Obamas policies), and to not go against his policies and what he has done in the past.
I feel that because of this idea that Obama is getting much of the campaign hoopla, McCain feels that the more money he spends, the more publicity to get his name and policies to the general public. It is not about the money, it is how you present yourself to the general public, expecially in a time of crisis. By keeping our troops in Iraq, hardly cutting the middle class tax payers money, and so on, McCain needs to be able to back up how he feels on specific subjects. The more money spent to do this, the better his campaign will turn out. Their will actually be explanation, rather than "I am a War vetran, and I have been in Congress 26 years."
Also, if you look today at the statistics about the presidential election, the polls are as follows:
"General Election Polls
State Date Obama McCain
AVERAGE X 46.0 43.1
ABC News National Polls 9/19-22 52 43
CNN National Polls 9/19-21 48 45
Cook Political Report National Polls 6/17/08 44 40
Democracy Corps National Polls 9/22-24 47 44
Diageo National Polls 8/29-31 48 39
Fox News National Polls 9/22-23 45 39
Gallup National Polls 8/7-10 45 38
Ipsos National Polls 9/18-22 44 43
CBS News National Polls 9/12-16 49 43
Los Angeles Times National Polls 8/15-18 42 41
Marist National Polls 5/1/07 39 46
NBC National Polls 9/6-8 46 45
Newsweek National Polls 9/10-11 46 46
Pew Research National Polls 7/31-8/10 46 43
Quinnipiac National Polls 9/11-16 49 45
Rasmussen Reports National Polls 4/28/08 46 46
Time Magazine National Polls 7/31-8/4 46 41
USA Today National Polls 8/30-31 50 43
Zogby National Polls 9/23-25 44 46
Misc Pollsters National Polls 9/15-21 45 47 (http://www.usaelectionpolls.com/2008/national-polls.html)."
By looking at these statistics, it proves that Obama is becoming more of a well liked human being within the campaign. With Obama showing higher statistics, McCain needs to step it up.
Ps. the last two numbers, after the date are the statistics, Obama is first and McCaim is second
Entertaining the thought of a candidate being more or less "worthy" or credible, based upon the money spent on their campaign is ludacrous. Although the country is currently going through a financial crisis, campaign spending should not be an issue. Barack Obama is simply trying to market himself more by using more advertisements. Just because his campaign is well funded doesn't necessarily mean John McCain's campaign is struggling. Furthermore, Obama is using his campaign money to promote the wealth he wants to instill in the middle class. Finally, if a candidates' campaign is well funded by either their party or outsiders, is something that is minor and shouldn't be heavily focused upon. The issues that the candidate is trying to convey takes precedent over the amount of money their using to campaign it.
I don't think that you can buy your way into the White House, but obviously the more money you spend on your campaign the more recognition you will receive. Look at Barack Obama. He has spent 244 million dollars more on his campaign, but he is practically a celebrity in the eyes of Americans. Why is he nearly doubling the spending of the McCain campaign? Trying to look at things from a different view, Republicans might see this as a way to make up for all of the experience that Obama doesn't have. Spending millions of dollars more than McCain isn't going to definitely put Obama in the White House, but it sure isn't going to hurt his chances of being elected.
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