Joe Sudbay notes that Rasmussen now has Obama and McCain in a statistical tie. This should surprise no one. I've been saying since this election season really got into gear that the next president would be the Republican.
Despite the large number of Democratic candidates in the beginning, I always knew that this nomination was going to come down to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and John Edwards. And I always figured none of them could possibly win.
With Edwards the biggest problem was the recurrence of his wife's illness, but the media's willingness to ignore everything the man said and talk for weeks about his haircut and his house, showed me that he couldn't win. And you can bet that if he were the nominee right now, the nothing-but-hearsay Story We Will Not Repeat would be the nonstop topic on MSNBC.
Hillary Clinton certainly had the ability to fight back, but he came with steamer trunkloads of baggage and a an attention-hogging husband who was going to be a problem no matter what. And let's face it -- this country still doesn't like women who fight back and who stand up for themselves. Look at the adulation given Cindy McCain, whose job is to be a pretty, smiling cipher out on the campaign trail, and the attention given to Michelle Obama for daring to speak her mind. Hillary Clinton might have gone after the McCain smears with both barrels, but then we would have heard nonstop about what a castrating bitch she is and how much white working class males, who we all know are the only voters who matter in Media-Land, are threatened by her.
That left Barack Obama. The reason I didn't support Obama at the start was because of this annoying habit he has of believing that you can somehow do business with Republicans; that you can somehow reach across the aisle without pulling back something other than a bloody, gnawed stump. These people play for keeps, and with the exception of Bill Clinton, whom they hated because he was capable of getting just as down and dirty as they did, every Democratic nominee since I've been old enough to vote has made the same mistake of believing that Americans vote with something other than their worst impulses.
And their worst impulses are getting a good workout with Barack Obama.
I keep talking about this friend of mine who has decided to believe all the smear e-mails. I talk about her because she is not a Rush Limbaugh conservative. She is a centrist who insists she votes for the person, not for the party. She hates George W. Bush, she hates what he's done to this country. She dislikes John McCain, too. This is a woman who has a one-year-old granddaughter that she loves more than life itself. If she had to gouge out her own eye with a meat fork so that this baby could see, she would do it in a heartbeat. And yet she is not going to vote for Barack Obama, because she fears that he's "not loyal enough to this country." Why does she believe this? Because of e-mails she's received; e-mails that reach into that dark, scared, childish place in all of us and tap into our fears. John McCain may be awful, but at least he's not "a ni--" as Mel Brooks said in Blazing Saddles, a movie that is almost no longer funny because it's so spot-on. And he doesn't have a funny name that sounds like an Arab terrorist and his wife is a little lady, not someone with brass balls and her own opinions.
John McCain may be awful, but at least with him we know what we're going to get -- more screwing over of the middle class, more oil wars, more fear, more evisceration of our Constitution. In other words, more of the same. And at least he's not "a ni--".
Barack Obama, like Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, and John Kerry before him, wants to believe that "The American people are too smart to believe this." That kind of hope and optimism may be laudable, but it doesn't win elections. Because the truth is no, the american people are NOT too smart to believe it -- not when Republicans are right there with their sharp metal probe poking at the reptilian brain 24 x 7 on cable news.
And so here we are, with a Republican party in disgrace, led by as appalling a man as has ever held the office of the presidency. That party has put up a senile old man with anger management problems and a need to win a war at all costs to get over his Vietnam demons. And he's going to win. Because the Democrats Just. Don't. Get. It. They don't get that the media is not their friend. They don't get that Americans respond to fear every time. They don't get that if they would just STAND for something, they might do better.
Either that or Mr. Brilliant is right and it's all a scam and they're all on the same team...and the Democrats are only there to make you think you have a choice.
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