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Welcome to Doug Gibler's International Politics Blog! This blog serves to familiarize students with both contemporary and historical events mentioned in class. I'll do my best to keep the posts current with class, but please feel free to let me know if you think the blog is missing coverage of something. Enjoy!
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Completely agree with the studies posted...
Now, I wonder if that remains consistent this year. In my opinion, Obama's pick of Senator Biden neither helps nor hurts, and so easily backs up the study.
Governor Palin is a somewhat different case in my opinion, for a few reasons.
1) McCain may be the Republican nominee, but his failure to shore up the most conservative wing of the party made Palin a logical choice, because she sympathizes with so many of those positions.
Rasmussen Reports has a few interesting numbers on Palin. First, she seems to have energized those voting for McCain. The percentage of voters who are now "eager" to vote for McCain stands at 57%, which apparently is up quite a bit from earlier numbers. Here is the article (in it, there are many other interesting trends monitored.) http://www.rasmussenreports.com/public_content/politics/election_20082/2008_presidential_election/obama_number_one_palin_number_two_as_candidate_voters_most_want_to_meet
2) If the media continues to follow the story about Palin's daughter's pregnancy with the tenacity they have since the news broke, will that hurt, help or do nothing? It's not often that a V.P. has this type of controversy and attention upon him or her, at least to my knowledge.
However, to the overall point about V.P.'s not helping or hurting the ticket, I think that's largely true. I believe I read something a week or so ago that claimed that although Dan Quayle was disliked in the 1998 election, it didn't hurt Bush in his relatively easy victory over Dukakis.
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