Another American bank fails in the US:

Washington Mutual, the giant lender that came to symbolize the excesses of the mortgage boom, was seized by federal regulators on Thursday night in the largest bank failure in American history.

So another bank fails and gets nationalized by the US government, on top of what’s gone on down there already.  Since all of these failures that have occurred, Barack Obama’s fortunes have risen and John McCain’s stock has fallen. In addition, polls have shown the American public blames the Republicans for this economic mess, and believe Obama and Democrats in general would be better at managing the economy.

Meanwhile in Canada, we have a Conservative Government that has managed to squander a 12 billion $ surplus down to almost nothing in less then 3 years, with warning signs that our own economy is going to get worse, and yet not only does Harper make the astounding claim only he and his Conservative party are the only ones that can be good economic stewards on the impending economic crisis,  the Canadian public is somehow buying that line, if you read polling on the issue.

In my opinion, the counter-message to Harper’s claims on the economy on this isn’t being sent out enough or properly. The one Liberal ad going after Harper on the economy is a good start, but in my opinion, we need a lot more of those.

I was talking to one of my friends last night who graduated with me in Political Science from The U. Of Guelph. He now works as a Conservative Party staffer, and is more “conservative” then even what the official Conservative Party orthodoxy is right now which they are trying to present to the Canadian public. So, we don’t see eye to eye on Canadian politics, to say the least.

However, our discussion was about the Obama-McCain race in the US. I made the remark that I felt Obama was going to slaughter McCain in the presidential race - that it wouldn’t be close, and that he’d win 300 electoral votes minimum in this race. My friend spat out in reply there was “no way a liberal wins 300 electoral votes in the US! And have you seen the national polls?”. Putting aside the fact on whether Obama is as “liberal” as he claims, I have indeed seen the national polls - every day as a matter of fact - but as I reminded my friend, national popular vote isn’t what counts in the US (if it did, Al Gore would have been President and would have spared the world 8 years of grief and terrible leadership, and his own country’s constitution wouldn’t have been shredded or attempted to have been shredded in the name of “national security”.). State polls and state votes and their electoral votes are what counts.

I pointed out to him that if you look at a variety of electoral projection sites, including the Electoral-Vote.com site I have a link to on my sidebar here, as well as the Election Prediction site, (which is run by a couple of Republican supporters), those electoral counts show Obama either near or well over 300 (ironically, its the Republican-run site that has the highest # of electoral votes for Obama at this point in the state electoral race).

Regardless, my title is not referring to that. My friend and I then proceeded to get to the US Congress. While conceding the House of Rep. was “lost” to the Republicans, he was predicting the Republicans were going to re-take the Senate, which of course a) made my jaw drop, and b) confirmed to me that my friend has been listening to far too much of Anne Coulter, Rachel Marsden, Michelle Malkin and any other whacko right-wing commentator down there that you can think of. I’m even more secure in the fact that the Dems are going to pick up seats in the Senate then I am Obama going to win 300+ electoral votes, and I’m pretty confident in THAT, so I asked him if he’d like to place a little wager on that Senate prediction, which he accepted.

We were originally going to pick #’s, but that became a tad complex, so we made it a simple bet of me predicting the Dems would increase their Senate majority, while he predicted that the Repubs would pull off an upset and regain the majority. For the record, I was originally predicting the Dems would pick up 3 additional Senate seats, while he was predicting the Repubs to pick up +5 seats - yes, you read that right. His premise for that was he felt that battleground states would all vote Republican for McCain - thus electing McCain to the presidency, and thus they’d vote for the Republican Senate candidate as well. My conservative friend is being a tad hopeful in his prediction, I’d suggest. Others may have worse descriptions of his stance, but I’m a nice guy.

No polls support his current premise on the Senate, but hey, If he wants to give away a free dinner like that to me, who am I to argue?