The Republican candidate team minimizes itself media advantage

Ten days of the November 4 election, the Democratic candidate Barack Obama flew, this weekend, for Hawaii to visit his sick grandmother. Gesture sums up his campaign style: serenity and sense of priorities. American political scientists are almost unanimous in recognizing the "sans-faute" of the Illinois Senator since his speech of acceptance in Denver on August 28. Unlike his rival, apparently taken by surprise by the financial crisis, the Illinois Senator has been able to transform it into a campaign argument. According to the latest polls published on the eve of the weekend, he now credited with a lead of 10 points on John McCain (51-41 according to Reuters-CSPAN-Zogby). Nothing is played so far. At a little more than a week of voting, "Les echos" are reviewed the major files that go between the two candidates.

"Ultimately, this election will be a referendum on the conservative economic policy." "And although nothing is ever acquired by policy, it is betting on a wave of tide for Obama and his party," writes economist Paul Krugman in The New York Review of Books.

Sometimes criticized for his academic style and some blur on his economic doctrine, at halfway between a "clintonism without Clinton" and a "Blairism" revisited, the Democratic candidate briefly found himself overtaken by John McCain (48.3 against 45.4), around September 8. The bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the financial turmoil appear to have swept the Republican hopes. But for Barack Obama, it is also the result of a strong team and a campaign piloted hand by his "spin doctor", David Axelrod, former advisor to the Mayor of Chicago, Harold Washington, first black elected official of a large city American, from 1983 to 1987.

"War chests".

Its side, after briefly had the effect of surprise of the appointment of his his, Sarah Palin, Governor of Alaska from forty-four years the boiling, John McCain, seventy-two years, seems to have been rather penalized by "amateurism" of his rookie. While the "hockey mom" style (model mother) of the first lady of Alaska allowed him to shine at the convention of Saint-Paul, in early September, and election rallies. But the "Palin effect" was short-lived. Intended to consolidate the conservative base of the Republican party by expanding its audience with women, the candidate for the Vice-Presidency seems hardly convinced the female electorate or the independent. On these two critical targets for the election of November 4, Barack Obama retains a broad advance, with a gap of 20 points in his favour in women (58 against 38) and 26 points among Independents (56 versus 30). Finally, by threatening to give up to participate in the first on 26 September, at Oxford (Mississippi), presidential debate because of "force majeure", John McCain gave the impression of a certain improvisation to the financial crisis. This impression was not contradicted by the late and erratic manner in which he has distilled his proposals where in recent weeks. Even if the Republican candidate has lost nothing of his pugnacity, it became rather aggressive and irritable in the three presidential debates against a "master of itself" Obama and reassuring.

Of course, the breakthrough of the Illinois Senator also can be explained by more prosaic leverage. By refusing to grant electoral of the Federal State for the first time in the history of the American elections, and relying mainly on small donors private and the Internet, the Democratic candidate has accumulated "war chests" more impressive to $ 600 million for his campaign (against a grant capped at 84.1 million for John McCain). This gives him a publicity and media strike force clearly superior to that of his opponent. With funds raised by the Republican National Committee (NPC), the McCain campaign budget, however, is projected at $ 400 million, according to his entourage. The Republican candidate team minimizes itself media advantage.