David J. Williams

Obama is taking an enormous gamble in leaving Lieberman in charge of the Homeland Security Committee. All the arguments for doing so—new tone in Washington, increasing the chances of passing key legislation, another seat in the Senate, etc.—all of it pales before the fact that should another 9-11 occur on the new president’s watch, Lieberman will be the one in charge of the ensuing investigation. The Senator gave Bush a free pass these last couple of years, but I somehow doubt that the man he insinuated is a Marxist on the campaign trail would get anything approaching the same treatment. Lieberman’s whole MO is to use his centrist position for maximum political/media exposure; Obama had better hope that his decision to prioritize his domestic legislation above all else doesn’t ultimately hand Lieberman yet another opportunity to seize the limelight.

Obama’s decisive win shouldn’t let us lose sight of just how badly in need of reform our electoral process is—and just how close we may have come to another stolen election. On Friday, October 31st, Mike Connell, GOP IT specialist and Rove protege, found himself in an Ohio court being accused by a member of the Ohio bar of stealing the 2004 election in favor of George Bush. Connell asked for several days to prepare his deposition, claiming he was too busy to testify until after Election Day; attorney Cliff Arnebeck told him that was like the robber saying he couldn’t show up in court because he was busy getting ready to rob the bank.  The judge ordered Connell to be in court on Monday; Connell showed up with a battery of GOP lawyers and denied all wrongdoing under oath.  But any ability he had for maneuvering was at an end.

And that’s where things stood when the whistle blew. Whether or not another game-changing scheme really was in the works, in hindsight Obama’s lead was probably too pronounced to allow for any believable vote-fixing that would impact the national results.  But the fundamentals of the process—the use of private contractors, the lack of any standards from state to state, the ability of local elections officials to influence results, the proliferation of unreliable electronic voting machines, etc.—leave the door open for future thievery.  And there’s been multiple reports of irregularities in the Senate races still being counted. So this remains an issue that the broader public desperately needs to wake up to. Still, it’s worth taking a moment to recognize the outstanding NGOs and journalists who worked so tirelessly to keep this issue top of mind in the run up to the election:  in particular, BlackBoxVoting, Brad Friedman, Mark Crispin Miller, Greg Palast, Velvet Revolution, and of course the folks at Rolling Stone.

The latest counts reveal that Nebraska’s second congressional district (aka Omaha) has gone for Obama. This is the first time that a state has split its electoral votes (Maine is the only other state that even allows for this possibility). More importantly, it brings Obama’s EV total to 365. This is five EVs less than Bill Clinton got in 1992, but Obama is in a far stronger position than Bill ever was, and the Republican Party is in far deeper trouble.

And that’s putting it mildly. The GOP lost the twenty-something vote by a 38 point margin and is no longer competitive at the presidential level in the cities, while the McCain-Palin “real/fake America” rhetoric turned off educated voters in droves.  Acutely aware of just how shitty the numbers are, members of the (dwindling) GOP brain-trust met last week in Northern Virginia to try and discuss how they can be a more inclusive, “big tent” party. The answer, of course, is that they really can’t unless they can figure out how to deal with the millions of rabid Christians who comprise the backbone of what’s rapidly becoming a regional political party, centered on the Old South.  Fundamentalists are good at a lot of things, but compromise and rational negotiation are not among them, especially with Sarah Palin fully prepared to try to lead her soldiers to victory in 2012.  The prospects for the GOP look bleak indeed, particularly as America continues to become (a) less white, (b) less rural, and (c) less stupid.

Then again, the political landscape can shift in unexpected ways (just look at how it’s shifted since 04).  Obama could fuck up big time, and open the door for a Republican resurgence.  Or the economy could worsen into Dust Bowl proportions, which is always a good climate for extremist politics.  Or another 9-11 could convince the people that they must throw out the sinners who have seized control of the government and made God so #$# angry.  But in the meantime, it’s going to be a lot of fun watching the people who are so good at hating taking it out on each other instead of the rest of us.

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…

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.

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.

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.

In the end, the debate wasn’t even close. David Gergen said on CNN that McCain looked like he “had an anger management problem”; that was part of a broader policing-the-emotions issue. Hours of world-class debate prep failed to make inroads on McCain’s fundamental body language issue, nor was it able to wipe the frustration from his voice. And meanwhile Obama remained almost preternaturally calm: in its desperation, the right is now starting to use that as a weapon as well, the same way it tried to turn the “celebrity” issue on its head. Isn’t this guy human? Does he ever break a sweat?

Not in debates, apparently. Nor if there’s a camera within line-of-sight. But this race isn’t over yet.  Yesterday’s polls showed that McCain seemed to have arrested the slide in his numbers, if only temporarily; this debate may send them to new lows, but I suspect that what the next few days will actually show is that Obama has peaked too early—and his supporters may have peaked psychologically as well, given the overconfidence that their candidate is now chastening them on.  They would be advised to listen to him, as this race could easily tighten across the last two and a half weeks; keep in mind that the media wants a horserace, and would vastly prefer a “McCain as comeback kid who’s clawing his way back” narrative to one of Obama cruising to a massive, easy victory.

It’s also worth noting that there’s still a lot of time on the clock for an October Surprise, especially one that involves foreign policy. Bin Laden may yet make an appearance, if only on video.  But also, Bush/Cheney have more than a few cards to play as well, and both men are acutely conscious that their unprecedented attempt to expand presidential power beyond the limits of the Constitution will come under intense (and possible legal) scrutiny should Obama win. (I doubt that Obama himself wants to take this step, but an awful lot of shit is going to come out even if the top players burn/destroy all their files.)  So it’s no surprise that the administration has been anxious to catch Bin Laden in the waning days of the election.  And anyone who thinks this is just a matter of Bush’s legacy is #$# kidding themselves.