This is your political rundown for October 30, 2008.
We’re running down political perspectives from MSNBC, BBC, and Fox News.
With only five days to go until the 2008 U.S. presidential election, most pundits were talking about Barack Obama’s 30-minute infomercial.
We begin with MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann who gives an overview of the ad.
“At 8 p.m. eastern, TV first, Senator Obama first airing that half-hour, multi-million dollar primetime infomercial, the first time since Ross Perot that a candidate aired an extended advertisement of that kind. In it the Democratic nominee again sharing the details of his own biography as well as the details of the struggles of four working American families.” (www.msnbc.com)
Katty Kay of BBC World News speculates that the ad might be seen as excessive.
“It is shock and awe but there is also some concern that looks a little bit like overreach. I spoke to one campaign staffer today who said ‘when we bought this air time four weeks ago, when the polls were tighter, it seemed like a very good idea. We are a little bit concerned today that people are going to see this in the same way they thought of that Berlin speech in front of 200,000 people—that it was a little bit too grandiose.” (www.bbc.co.uk)
FOX News took a hard look at the latest poll numbers.
Political polls put Obama ahead of McCain, but the margins vary widely: from one percent to 15 percent nationally.
On the O’Reilly Factor, former Bush campaign strategist Karl Rove commented on the large number of political polls.
“There have been 728 national polls conducted this year. By comparison there were 239 polls conducted in all of 2004. There have been 215 national tracking polls this month there were 67 last October. There will be almost as many national polls in the month of October of 2008 as there were during the entire year of 2004.” (www.foxnews.com/oreilly)
What do you think of advertising by each campaign? What do you think of political polls?
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