By now most interested observers will have seen the video of four year old Abigael crying about being sick of Romney and Obama.
The pundits on every network (bar Fox it seems, running on hatedrenalin) sound exhausted by it, nerves are fraying, and the exasperation with yet another ‘balanced’ discussion where two people with increasingly tenuous claims to authority recite the most recent version of the talking points in their inbox is becoming more and more visible.
Voters are exhausted too, particularly those in swing states. It might have something to do with news viewers having to sit through twenty two consecutive political advertisements, being robocalled up to ten times a day, emailed as often as five times a day and having their doors knocked on frequently, then being asked what they think about all of that by a cavalcade of reporters.
The advertising space is so crammed, it is almost the most expensive air time there is (although it’s still not in the realm of superbowl advertising dollars). And the campaigns still have money to spend. The Romney campaign in particular is frantically spending large sums that they have raised in the last days of the campaign in areas with conceivably only marginal benefit, such as television advertising in neighboring states in the hope that the advertising will ‘bleed over’ into Ohio.
The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee sent their people a memo listing last minute options if they still had money to spend, the most crucial of which was search advertising, to appear when voters Google their candidates and their polling places.
I’ll be spending the next two days in Scranton, Pennsylvania, with one of the 5117 Get Out The Vote (GOTV) teams the Obama campaign has unleashed. After billions of dollars, and many months of hard work, this is all that remains. Oh and the recount lawyers.
Scranton is in a state that most pollsters tip as a relatively comfortable win for the President. The Democrats, particularly, have scoffed at the Romney campaign ramping up their efforts here, saying it’s too little too late. Which makes the fact that this guy is coming here the night before election day kind of interesting.
Photo: Cain and Todd Benson
