Towards the election of 2008

Much more negative information about Barack Obama was becoming known by mid-October 2008. The major shock was the revelation of his connection with the Weathermen in the early 1980's, when Obama was an undergraduate at Columbia University. The activities of the group ACORN that seemed to be conducting a concerted effort to fraudulently register voters. The otherwise left-leaning news network CNN even was running an interview with a young black man who had registered over seventy times for ACORN in Ohio. None of that mattered, though. The television news and newspapers had successfully sold the Republicans in an extremely negative story line. They had established in the American populace that Republicans were all fundamentalist Christians who were trying to force their religion on other Americans. Republicans were also incompetent and corrupt. Barack Obama's lack of credentials and association with anti-American figures and domestic terrorists was irrelevant in comparison. John McCain was the only Republican who might overcome the negatives, but as October progressed, his chances of success seemed very slight.