By Hudes DesrameauxCSMS Magazine Staff Writer

New Analysis

 Registering to vote a smiling Salvadoran right after his naturalization ceremony in Miami Beach, less than $20.     Putting Florida on the win column, as the Obama campaign aggressively strives to deny the Arizona Senator John McCain the sunshine state and the 2008 presidential election, $39 million.    Being white in such a crucial presidential race, as John McCain and his surrogates subtly keep reminding the electorate, priceless.    About three weeks ago and right after the Republican convention where John McCain and his shock troops stopped short of telling the audience that they have never heard of George W. Bush, and the Democrats were really in power during the last eight years, John “Drill Drill” McCain was well on his way to stunningly winning the presidential race. Countless polls then suggested that McCain had started to distance himself from Barack Obama.     At PunditVille, we were again served these useless recurring clichés to explain this sudden shift. Yeah, there was the Sarah “Wink Wink” Palin factor but the political narrative was that some part of the electorate doesn’t know Obama, and that the latter needs to introduce himself to the American people, especially the white working class inhabiting the battleground states of Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia.    It doesn’t matter to the punditocracy that Obama has been on the news for more than a year, running countless political ads, crisscrossing all “57” states (to quote a fatigued Obama) and participating in more than thirty debates. It never occurs to the talking heads that the so-called white working class knows enough about Obama: He’s a black man. And if you want these well-rounded individuals to impress upon you their deep knowledge of Barack Obama, they may also tell you that he is an elitist, may have been schooled in a madrasa in Indonesia while John McCain with his 7 houses, 13 cars and his millions is nothing more than a regular patriotic guy drilling his way to the presidency. Go figure!    Much water since then has passed under the crumbling US economic bridge. The fundamentals of the American economy are unraveling as banks and other financial institutions are daily going under while sending shockwaves throughout the economical landscape. The macroeconomic indicators can’t be any clearer. Unemployment rolls are on the increase. Inflation is running high, pushing food prices and gas out of reach for millions of Americans. The $700 billion rescue package is nothing but a small deposit to jumpstart the moribund economy. Any recovery, according to experts, will take weeks before MainStreet feels the full soothing effect of this stopgap solution.    New polls are now showing something else: Among likely or registered voters, Obama has a solid 7 point difference over John McCain. And if you refer to the last AP poll that also includes cell phone-carrying voters, then the difference is bigger, 9 to be exact. The much-talked about battleground states, and even Florida, are inching slowly but surely to the Obama column. Worse yet: John McCain has already conceded Michigan, removing staff and other resources from that state and shifting them to states (like Indiana and North Carolina) that have lately voted republican in presidential races. The huge Obama war chest is making a difference, forcing McCain to spend precious resources on states the Republicans easily won elections after elections. Their strategy of bringing the fight to Democratic states like Michigan pays no dividends. The electoral map is being redrawn to the dismay of the stunned Republicans. The 2008 election is far from over, though. But the McCain campaign is mortally bleeding.    The fundamentals of the McCain campaign are showing again distressed signs of instability and a lack of vision. John “Country First” McCain (he was really born in Panama at the ‘American’ canal; so we shouldn’t assume he’s talking about the good old USA) has really been John “Demagoguery First” McCain. From toying with the idea of reporting the Republican convention with hurricane Ike washing ashore to falsely “suspending” two weeks later the campaign to focus on “finding a solution” to the economic crisis, the McCain campaign has nothing else to offer to the American people but the stinking buffet of personal attacks, bold lies and misleading statements.    The Sunday edition of the Washington Post gave an early look of what the McCain campaign, short of a big October surprise, plans to do in the next four weeks. Nation, brace yourself for more of Pastor Jeremiah Wright and former weatherman underground and current university professor Bill Ayers.    Sarah Palin already seized on the Sunday New York Times article that looked at the Obama/Ayers relation over the years to say that Obama is “palling” around with terrorists. It doesn’t matter that the conclusion of the New York Times article points not to a long and deep relation between the two men. It doesn’t matter to the McCain campaign that Bill Ayers is an education guru at the University of Illinois. No less than the current Chicago mayor Richard Daley has been effusively heaping praise on Mr. Ayers—a man who has surely paid his dues and is making, through his work on education and juvenile delinquency, a tremendous difference in Chicago.    The question: How much of the Ayers/Wright “issue” will the American people be able to stomach, a mere 30 days before the election?  Will John McCain’s new weapons of mass distraction (WMD) fire as well as the real weapons of a no growth economy? Doubtful. The right-wingers at Fox News have already played the Jeremiah/Ayers tape so much that there isn’t much to say about these two. This is why the focus will instead be on the cultural front. Obama isn’t one of us – whatever cultural connation that may embody.    Will that work? I’m not too sure. What Obama has to do is to confront head on these racist comments and quickly re-focus the campaign on what truly matters: continue to articulate issues that make sense to the middle class and poor Americans: a job-producing economy, universal health care, early childhood education for all kids and, as important as anything else, withdrawal from Iraq.Note: Hudes Desrameaux is a writer and editorialist for CSMS Magazine. He lives and works in suburban Miami. Also see Sarah Palin: idiotism mixed with religious zeal in the pursuit of furtherance of war Senator Clinton: What’s next for her? When will race seize to be the cornerstone of American politic?Hillary Clinton’s Paranoia and the Democrats Dilemma Hillary Clinton wants to clinch the nomination at all costIs Barack Obama unstoppable after his stunning victory in Iowa last week?   The Obama campaign plunges deeper into the defensive after the Nevada lost last Saturday