Fox News’ Brit Hume calls a McCain win ‘very difficult, if not impossible’
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Count Fox News anchor Brit Hume among those who believe that Sen. John McCain faces an uphill battle over the next three weeks.
During a lunchtime address to Fox News advertisers in midtown Manhattan today, the veteran political journalist said that the current atmosphere -- particularly the deep financial crisis -- is working against the Republican presidential nominee.
“I wish I could tell you, just because it would make it so much more exciting, that John McCain could ... rally from where he is now in the race to something closer than it is,” said Hume, managing editor of the cable news network’s Washington bureau. “But I think the conditions so deeply favor the Democratic nominee this year that it is going to be very difficult , if not impossible, for McCain to overcome that.”
Still, Hume added, “there is a glimmer of a chance that it might go the other way.” The election will come down to lingering doubts that voters have about Sen. Barack Obama, he said.
Here was Hume’s analysis:
Barack Obama, whom I find to be an utterly charming and totally appealing character –- he’s genial and he has this incandescent smile and he’s articulate and he’s unfailingly pleasant and he’s dignified –- nonetheless has some weaknesses. It is true he has a thin resume. I think that worries a lot of people, and all the people who would vote against Obama because he has a thin resume are already going to vote Obama and there aren’t enough of them to beat him. But he ought to be farther ahead than he is, given the circumstances. And I think there’s a resistance to him that I would attribute to what you might call the who-is-this-guy factor? And it’s partly the fact that his resume is thin, but his background seems a little indistinct and it seems a little incongruous and out of phase with the man we see before us. Here’s this enormously attractive, knowledgeable and impressive man, and yet he comes out of a strange background of Chicago machine politics, to some extent. He has some dubious associations. People were shocked and I think appalled at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright matter, which I think sowed seeds of doubt about Obama that are still present in the minds of a lot of people who worry about him, just wonder about who he really is. And you wonder also whether if his ideological agenda is the one he’s proposing, or if there’s something else going on. And nobody knows the answer to that question. And in that lies at least some prospect that this race may turn out differently from the way it appears headed.
But Hume also warned that any shifts in the public polling in the upcoming days could be deceiving.
‘In the latter stages, the final closing weeks of a presidential campaign, the race gets tighter,’ he said. ‘It just does. It’s kind of a natural tightening that occurs. And it can lead you to believe that ‘Oh my God, the situation is changing, and the underdog is coming back.’ ‘
-- Matea Gold