David J. Williams

Ok, I lied. . . election coverage continues. . . North Carolina has been called for Obama. . .will someone pull me away from this #$# computer????

There seem to be three major precedent-models for Obama.

Model #1: FDR, 1932. Obama engineers a second New Deal while building a new progressive majority.

Model #2: Carter, 1976. Obama gets blamed for everything, and becomes a one-term president.

Model #3: Clinton, 1992. Obama hangs on to power while falling well short of his initial promise.

#1 is eminently possible, if he runs the government as well as he ran his campaign.  Seldom have both expectations and challenges been so high for an incoming president.

As for Bush and Cheney, history will bury them. (The latter probably quite soon, I’m guessing.)

It was interesting to watch McCain last night: he looked like a burden had been lifted from his shoulders, and I found myself wondering once more what kind of campaign he could have run had he tacked toward the center. But the truth of the matter is that his running on the base was virtually inevitable when you consider that the GOP no longer has any senior political operatives who weren’t trained in the Atwater-Rove school—i.e., the Republicans at this point literally have no idea how to run a presidential campaign that isn’t based on crude “othering” techniques.  It’s significant that a lot of them thought that McCain’s central failing was that he wasn’t extreme enough and didn’t attack Obama to the extent he could have.  Watching that party struggle to find a coherent message for 2010/2012 is going to be very interesting.

And as for the president-elect, he faces historic difficulties, but it’s going to be incredibly refreshing to have a president who (a) doesn’t seem to be rife with insecurities, (b) doesn’t seem to have an anger management problem, (c) seems to have some insight into his own psyche, and (d) is actually smart and intellectually curious. Also, until this year I never thought I’d see a black president in my lifetime (save perhaps through the elevation of a VP selection), and I’m glad to be proven totally and completely wrong.

And to all readers of my blog who have been wishing I would shut up about the #$# election and write some more about Vin Diesel, thanks for bearing with me.  Now that the country’s taken a step back from what looked like an inexorable slide toward a police state, I plan on resuming normal programming….stay tuned…

Fresh (or not so fresh) from Obama’s last campaign rally, held last night in Manassas, VA, I can only say that getting out of the parking lot subsequently was as bad as any Ozzfest I’ve ever been to. But while I was staring at the lights of the car ahead of me, I was thinking of What a Long Strange Trip it’s been. Here’s my final take:

Best Move, Obama:  Refusing to go all-out nuclear/negative when the GOP attacks were mounting across early September and he was falling behind in the polls.  Not only did this spare the public the spectacle of an Angry Black Man (something that Obama has clearly given a lot of thought to), but it left him perfectly positioned when the economy began to wither and cool unflappability became an asset.

Biggest Mistake, Obama: Not offering up any major policy item as a symbolic gesture to the right. I’m thinking here of Bill Clinton’s welfare reform plank in 1992, so critical in portraying himself as a new kind of Democrat. It’s surprising to me that Obama, who’s been so adroit at trying to rise above the Blue State vs. Red State divide, didn’t go down similar lines, though his rhetoric has been highly effective at bridging the gap anyway.

Best Move, McCain:  Drawing blood with the Joe the Plumber/redistributor-in-chief attack.  Though what makes this such horseshit is that it’s actually the Red States who have their snouts in the government trough at the expense of the Blue States.  (Paying for somebody else’s crack habit is bad enough, but when that crackhead keeps on screaming about how you’re a fake American, you start to feel like you’re being used . . . )

Biggest Mistake, McCain:  Clearly Palin. It could have been such a brilliant move (and in terms of shoring up the base, it was), but she just wasn’t ready for prime-time and has hurt McCain with the undecideds.  He shoulda gone with Kay Bailey Hutchinson.  She may not be as telegenic, but she can hold her own in any press conference.

That’s all for now. If the election is largely fair, then Obama should have the whole thing sewn up by mid-evening with about 350 big ones.  If the fix is in, and it turns out that U.S. elections can be rigged even when they’re not close, then Pennsylvania is probably where things will start to unravel first.  I’m betting that all the bullshit/schemes are going to be overwhelmed by a massive Obama turnout, but we shall see.

Make no bones about it, an American presidential campaign is the greatest show on Earth. Wednesday is going to have us all feeling like the circus has left town (and it had better, otherwise we’ll be facing the nightmare of a disputed election). It seems amazing that an African-American is now within a hairsbreath of the presidency; it seems all the more amazing that he’s managed to do so while decisively defeating the Clintons and battling the Right Wing Attack Machine to a standstill.

It might also seem incredible that the GOP is even remotely competitive in such a year as this, though (as I’ve noted before) a lot of that is due to the underlying electoral map.  But credit also goes to John McCain. The pundits are falling over themselves to declare what a shitty race he’s run; personally, I think it’s little short of a political miracle that he’s managed to convince so many voters that it’s neither constructive nor even possible to hold the party that’s governed America for eight years accountable for what it’s done. Had those eight years not made themselves all too apparent in the form of the economy cratering, it’s entirely conceivable that McCain’s early September lead would never have evaporated. Even if tomorrow’s returns realign everything on a seismic scale, it’s worth considering (in the words of the Duke of Wellington) what a “damn near run thing” this whole thing has been.

Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations…They only know the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and where there is no vision the people perish.

This Tuesday may we reclaim that vision.

Esquire‘s endorsement of Obama is probably the most devastating piece of writing I’ve seen on the election. It’s worth reading in its entirety, but here are some of the best bits.

More than any other recent election, we are voting this year not merely for a president but to overthrow two governments. The one we can see is the one in which constitutional order has been defaced, the national spirit degraded, and the country unrecognizable because so much of the best of itself has been sold off or frittered away. The other one is the far more insidious one, a doppelgänger nation of black prisons, shredded memos, and secret justifications for even more secret crimes. Moreover, the current administration has worked hard not only to immunize itself from the political and legal consequences of the government we can see, but it has also worked within the one we cannot see in order to perpetuate itself. . .

There is no evidence at all that anything will change under a President John McCain, who has already identified Roberts and Alito as his beau ideals of Supreme Court justices. He has made brave noises about torture and the extraconstitutional prerogatives of the executive, but President Bush and his men went on and did what they wanted anyway, and McCain walked away, begging for votes from fundamentalists who hate him, meeping his displeasure in ways that were barely audible. The virus will gestate and spread on his watch, all throughout the federal government. Bushism must be ripped out, root and branch, everywhere it has been established, or else the presidential election of 2008 is a worthless exercise in futility. Barack Obama may not be the man to do it, but John McCain, for all his laudable qualities, clearly is neither willing nor able to do so.

To continue to govern ourselves this way is unthinkable. It is unsustainable as a democracy to continue to mock so egregiously in secret what we continue to profess in public. That is the task for the next president. That is the main reason to vote for Barack Obama of Illinois. We strongly encourage you to do so.

There seem to be two major models for how the race will play out across the final four days. The first of those is the Standard Model: that the race continues to tighten, as it seems to have been doing (though not nearly as quickly as McCain would want). The other, of course, is the 1980 scenario: that the independents and undecideds break en masse toward one of the candidates, the way they did for Reagan over Carter. Should this occur, it will almost certainly be in Obama’s direction, since—as in 1980—the fundamentals (crap economy/inane foreign policy) are stacked against the incumbent party.

Were this an ordinary election, either scenario would work for Obama.  But—as I’ve said more than once—we’re now into eight years of a systematic attempt to undermine the vote, and we can’t take anything for granted anymore.  Already the reports of widespread fraud are pouring in—even as the media wring their hands over potential flaws in the polling, while simultaneously waxing poetic about the (almost certainly mythical) Bradley Effect.  They will need both storylines to explain a McCain upset if the current numbers hold up across the campaign’s last days; far better to delve into endless faux analyses on closet racists and dodgy polls than to touch the Third Rail of Vote Fraud.  (This was what Hitler meant when he said the bigger the lie, the more people tend to believe it.)  Flashback to 1992:  when George Stephanopoulos informed Governor Clinton that he had a solid two point lead going into Election Day, both men knew it was in the bag.  Those were simpler times; Obama will need as large a cushion as possible—meaning that everything comes down to the Senator’s awe-inspiring groundgame, the full weight of which is now being felt across the battleground states.

I talked yesterday about the extent to which the electoral math continues to be stacked in the direction of the GOP. Today I want to talk about another dynamic that also advantages the GOP: the question of what constitutes legitimate presidential power. This has become perhaps the most glaring double-standard in American politics today, allowing Republican presidents to get away with shit that Democratic presidents can only dream of. When Bush attacked Iraq, we were told by right-wing ideologues that we had to support the president or be declared unpatriotic.  Of course, I can’t help but remember that back in the 1990s Rush Limbaugh and his ilk showed no such forbearance to Clinton in his Bosnian adventures, and I distinctly recollect how mercilessly they attacked him any time he went after Bin Laden.  (Though now they castigate him for allowing him to get away.)

But that’s the nature of a double-standard.  The real question is what’s driving it, and I think part of the answer lies in the fact that the GOP is far more adroit than the Democrats are at manipulating cultural symbols like the flag (and the Bible, for that matter).  Keep in mind, too, that the core of the GOP is far more comfortable with autocratic ideation than the Democrats ever will be (partially because so much of the GOP base would clearly prefer a theocracy to a republic, so it comes naturally to them).  Indeed, foreign wars are often the vehicle via which democracies slide toward dictatorships:  this is a dynamic which we see clear hints of in the GOP’s calling Obama a terrorist, etc.  (And check out the latest campaign incident in which a McCain crowd turned ugly and was ready to start kicking some peacenik ass.)

So the GOP reserves for itself a view of executive power that borders on the monarchial . . . as long as the sitting president is Republican.  But if the president isn’t—and this is the really dangerous part—then the very legitimacy of his holding office is immediately called into question.  Clinton was the first to feel the brunt of this attack, but that’s likely to be a drop in the bucket compared to what a President Obama would face (already the more vitriolic of McCain’s supporters are declaring that he “wouldn’t be my president.”).  This is one more reason why Obama has to hope he doesn’t just win, but that he wins big, lest a close victory be a Pyrrhic one.  When Republicans win the Oval Office with a 50.00000000001% majority (or even when they fail to attain a majority) they can declare a mandate, whereas a Democrat can only declare the same when he has a landslide big enough to bury the Himalayas. Confused?  You’re clearly just not patriotic enough, you #$# traitor.

A week out from the election, the surfacing of yet another plot against Obama underscores the central danger that haunts this race. Colin Powell is said to have declined to run in 1996 in large part because of his wife’s fears that a black presidential candidate would be an irresistible target; Obama has the added burden of knowing that the opposition party is inflaming its supporters with rhetoric branding him a traitor/terrorist. But any would-be assassins who get inspired listening to Palin pray to God to somehow save us from the Democrats are amateurs by definition.  Doesn’t mean they couldn’t succeed—but the skinhead fuckwits who comprised this latest plot probably wouldn’t have been able to carry out a successful robbery of a 7-11, let alone getting weapons anywhere near Barack Obama.

The real question at this point is whether there’s a professional plot in the works.  This is a tough one to analyze, because it opens the gates of what pundits are pleased to call Conspiracy Theory, and as such encourages dogmatic (and unprovable) statements like No Way in Hell Could That Shit Happen in the U.S. of A.  (despite it happening everywhere else throughout recorded history).  The correct stance, of course, is one of watchful agnosticism, particularly because the men who rule this country have proven themselves to be capable of pretty much anything—and the problem they face now isn’t that Obama’s black, or that he’s socialist, or not Christian enough; it’s simply that he would disrupt a hold on power which they had every reason to believe would endure indefinitely.  Backed by a never-ending war and a spurious legal framework that guaranteed the total supremacy of executive power, those who occupied the White House could look forward to a permanent GOP majority sustained by the endless invoking of patriotism during elections even as Republican operatives worked behind the scenes to rig them.  Hold a few elections under those terms, and eventually elections become votes in name only.

But Obama threatens to torpedo all those calculations, because it’s tough to rig elections when the other candidate is several points ahead, and is racking up huge numbers in the Electoral College.  It’s certainly not impossible, though it would require that the media indulge in cognitive dissonance on a scale that would make the 2004 exit polls/actual “results” dichotomy look positively tame.  The prediction of race riots if McCain wins is potentially part of the propaganda meme here; in the event of a poll-defying McCain victory, the already-alerted police and military will do their best to convince angry citizen-mobs to do their duty and (as Anne Applebaum so idiotically said back in 2004) “accept the verdict.”  In so doing they would be helped by right-wing brownshirts convinced that it’s really the Democrats who were trying to steal the election all along.

But this kind of scenario is touch and go, and could totally fall apart if Obama gains enough in the polls to get him into realigning election/landslide territory.  A catastrophic event prior to the election is in some ways even crazier, but can’t be ruled out, because it at least has the advantage of justifying a martial law under which the election could be safely managed.  The most likely course of events at this point is probably that nothing happens:  that the disarray we’re seeing right now on the right is genuine, and total, and precludes any extra-constitutional measures beyond an attempt to steal the vote.  Meaning it will all probably come down to whether Democratic turnout overwhelms crookedness at the polls.

Nonetheless, if I were Obama, I’d be keeping a pretty close eye on my Secret Service detail these days, since standing down the bodyguards is a standard part of any serious attempt to eliminate a target.   I’d also make damn sure of my campaign aircraft.  Six years ago yesterday Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota (and arch-nemesis of the Bush White House) died in a highly suspicious crash that allowed his Senate seat to pass into the hands of the GOP in the election one week later.  Obama is the only 08 presidential candidate to have experienced an aircraft incident, and one of his rallies was the site of the only reported Secret Service/security breakdown that’s occurred thus far.  These are probably coincidences, but this is a year we really don’t need them.

“Every nation has its war party. It is not the party of democracy. It is the party of autocracy. It seeks to dominate absolutely. It is commercial, imperialistic, ruthless. It tolerates no opposition. . . .The purpose of this ridiculous campaign is to throw the country into a state of sheer terror, to change public opinion, to stifle criticism, and suppress discussion, and if every preparation for war can be made the excuse for destroying free speech and a free press and the right of the people to assemble together for peaceful discussion, then we may well despair of ever again finding ourselves for a long period in a state of peace. The destruction of rights now occurring will be pointed to then as precedents for a still further invasion of the rights of the citizen.”  –Senator Bob La Follette (R-Wisconsin), during WWI