Election 2008-The View From the Cheap Seats

From where I sit, things are starting to shape up nicely for Obama supporters, for the Democratic Party, for the nation, and for that matter for the world as a whole. I can feel the 8 year run of incompetence, corruption, and complete disdain for everything from the constitution to good old-fashioned common sense nearing an end, and we will all be the better for it. Not that I expect things to drastically change overnight, just as Rome wasn’t built in a day, neither will America be rebuilt in a few bold strokes, the hole is too big and the task too difficult to accomplish with quickness or with ease. But just as FDR’s election in 1932 didn’t immediately lift the nation out of the Depression, Obama’s election in 2008 will at least lay the groundwork for helping us to get out of our funk. Just knowing that someone with intelligence and understanding of the basic causes of our problems is on the job will be enough to get this great nation back on its feet, and that is not only good for us, but for the rest of the West as well, as we are still the leader of the free world as the saying goes, and despite our diminished standing, I still believe that the rest of the West, and in many cases the non-Western world is looking to us to get our act together.

Why the optimism you may ask, when the media and the pundits and many polls show this to be a close election, with the candidates seemingly running neck and neck, down to the wire, and all the other great horse racing analogies you can think of. The answer is simple, I don’t believe in the media, the pundits, or the polls. What I do believe in is the common sense and sound judgment of the American voting public. Of course only time will tell, but for what it’s worth two months before the election, this is how I am handicapping the horse race.

I see Obama in a landslide, winning 35-40 states, including most of the big electoral prizes. I see traditional Democrats, whose registration numbers far outpace those of registered Republicans, showing up on November 4 to cast their votes for Obama. I also expect that young people, while traditionally unreliable, will prove to be a different lot and will realize that we are in a different time. I believe that this generation will prove to be the most politically active since the 60’s, and may end up being the most effective generation in our nations relatively brief history, and that they will show up in record numbers and cast their votes for Obama. I also think that the independent voters will see through the McCain façade of maverickism and realize that this would-be emperor indeed has no clothes, that what he is offering is simply more of the same ideas and policies that have put us in such dire shape. Lastly, I believe that Hillary supporters will see the election for what it is, a choice between two people, one who is squarely on the right side of most issues of importance to women, the other clearly on the wrong side of these issues. Sarah Palin may be a pit bull with lipstick, but she is also a social conservative, anti-abortion, right-wing hard-liner who will not appeal to the majority of voters who supported Clinton’s candidacy.

The polls are an indicator of what the people who are polled think, and nothing more or less than that. I do not put much credence into the idea that you can poll a couple thousand people and extrapolate that to a voting population that numbers in the many tens of millions. There are too many leaps of faith required to buy into that notion. As for the media, I will simply pose this set of questions. Is it not in their best interests for this to be a close race? Will that not produce better TV ratings and sell more papers? Isn’t it then easy to see how they would make the race appear to be closer than it is? When watching a football game, you don’t hear the announcers claim just before halftime that the game is pretty much a done deal, you all might as well flip the channel or go out and do some yard work. Can you really expect the corporate owned and profit driven mass media to do likewise? As they say on the Fox News Network, we report and you decide, so you tell me, is the mission of today’s media to serve as the fourth estate, to watch over and report on the workings of the government, to thoroughly and objectively investigate and report, or is it simply to find, and often times to create controversy because that is what has the biggest impact on the bottom line? I propose, you decide.

I do honestly believe that our two party political system will be best served when it is no longer merely a two party system. However, before that occurs, the reality is that we are stuck with what we have, and in that system, I assert that it is in the best interests of the nation that we have two strong and competitive parties. Unfortunately, we don’t have that now, what we have is a Republican party that is near bankrupt when it comes to big ideas. We have a party that has exhausted its energy on appealing to social and religious conservatives, that has squandered its reputation as the party of small government and fiscal discipline, that has run out of chances to show that trickle down economics benefits anyone but the economic elites, and that has made a shambles out of foreign policy to the extent that the architect of peace through strength, Ronald Reagan, must be doing summersaults in his grave.

We also have a Democratic party that has failed miserably at the Congressional level to bring about any significant reform in the last two years on the economy, the environment, or education, and has steadfastly refused to address the war in Iraq in a serious matter, preferring to hide behind a thin majority and seeming to prefer an election issue to the pursuit of moral and ethical public policy.

So we are left with an individual in Barack Obama that offers us one last hope for helping to start the long and arduous process of digging out from the hole we have been put in, and in many ways have put ourselves in. One man can’t do it alone, but the hope is that he can inspire and motivate and lead countless citizens to step up to the plate and do their bit for the good old U.S. of A, and that in doing so maybe we can not only extricate ourselves from a major mess, but that we can rediscover our national soul in the process. In answer to the question posed by JFK nearly 50 years ago, what we can do for our country, for starters, is to elect as our next president the most intelligent, articulate, and inspiring leader since Kennedy. This will by no means solve our problems by itself, but if we continue to answer Kennedy’s call to serve our country, we just might be amazed by the results we get.