Black President by Rick Schmidt
Hooray! It’s pubdate for BLACK PRESIDENT! Hope I hear from some UK readers soon.
Of course THE UPCOMING US ELECTION is on my (everyone’s!) mind here. In Black President I have a chapter on how the ‘hanging chad’ punched ballots of 2000 were designed to make it truly impossible to know who you were voting for. Anyway, I’ve had trouble believing it was just serendipity that messed up the accuracy of that particular ballot. And now, on to the next round of confusion/deception…
Supporting my concern about the upcoming 2008 Presidential election…just saw a show on TV on a recent local race for city councilman in Florida that had inaccurate counting. The reporter stated that after the first tally of the local election it seemed the Republican had won by 9 votes. But then a hand recount revealed that THE DEMOCRAT had actually won…by 130 votes! And finally, it was discovered that 3500 ballots were missing!! If we can send a man to the moon (we really did this, right?) then why can’t we get this election thing under control?
For the 2004 election, it was tabulated that 638 people or so voted in a small Ohio community, and yet G. W. Bush received over 4000 votes at that location! Another fact: 80,000 uncounted votes in Georgia… Here are some of the complaints of Floridians after the 2000 and 2004 elections:
2+ to 15 hour waits (long lines)
Only ONE phone number for precincts (line always busy).
Missing machines.
Poles opening late.
People turned away.
Broken machines w/people turned away.
2 machines for 1300 people,
Faulty vote counting.
Missing ballots.
Inaccurate ‘Felons’ list.
Names removed from lists.
Pre-punched ballots
Cars towed.
And then there’s THE SPIN. Of recent days, we have the “lipstick on a pig” debacle? Yes, I know it’s last week’s news, but the point is that the Republican SPIN is up and running at full tilt. They (Republican spin-masters) take ANY words Obama says, and use the meaning out of context, runing ads on TV that say he called potential Republican VP Sarah Palin a pig…with lipstick on. McCain used the exact same phrase weeks earlier (‘a pig with lipstick on is still a pig’). Of course millions of impressionable middle-Americans see ads repeated and believe it! So the damage is done. And other ads have supposedly made 1/3 of the population believe obama is a Muslim. And it is infuriating to hear McCain continually say as fact that ‘Obama will raise your taxes.’ How many times does Obama have to re-explain that he’ll lower taxes on 90% and only raise them for people earning over $250,000? Somewhere in the textbook on ‘winning an election’ it must say that ‘repetition can overcome any fact.’
So I’m a little uneasy about what’s coming, and how there will most probably be an entirely new election horror story we can bat around in November! The latest economic meltdown seems to be gifting Obama with a raised percentage, putting him temporarily ahead in the polls as of late Sept,. but who’s to say it will hold. I know it’s not healthy to hold one’s breath for a month, but…
October 3rd, 2008 at 5:19 pm
Hi Rick,
Very interesting and it has to be said, even a cynic like myself is beginning to really root for Obama against the grim prospect of a McCain-Palin victory delivering a government even more reactionary and incompetent than George W’s. Of course, US Imperialism is actually in decline (a bit like Britain at the time of Suez) and it’s this which is telescoping freaks of history like Bush, Palin and McCain to the fore. That they can get away with “knobbling elections” represents a triumph of the executive (and thus of parapolitics) over the legislature that is a key characteristic of the coercive state and (sadly) something that we also see in a different form in the UK.
Thus while Obama “aint no comrade” an Obama victory is somewhat desirable as a basic defence of democracy – if nothing else.
And by the way….Sara Palin really is a reactionary, backward pig in lipstick. I’m NOT running for office and I CAN say it….and I don’ty care about the spin!
October 14th, 2008 at 3:46 am
Thanks Roger, for reminding me I’m not alone in my fear-factoring of McCain/Palin ticket. When Ronald Reagan was threatening to be elected back in 1980s several friends of mine promised to leave the country if he made it. Hardly anyone really did. But THIS TIME…Three weeks of craziness left to tell the tale!!