[Politics]
[politics] Sore losermen
A relative has a friend who stated categorically that she was voting for McCain because of his character. My relative asked her friend what she thought about McCain’s treatment of his first wife. The friend had no idea McCain had been married before Cindy. Unsurprisingly, she gets all her news from FOX.
I have a prediction to make. If Obama wins — and that is very, very far from a foregone conclusion, given the Bradley effect and the McCain campaign’s strenuous efforts to exploit that — many, many conservatives simply won’t accept it. Even if he manages a landslide of Reaganic proportions, those voters will feel cheated. Certainly the GOP has already been setting up the case, with all the ACORN nonsense, for example.
Two years ago as of this writing, the Permanent Majority was still a going thing. The GOP had convinced themselves, and millions of voters like my relative’s friend, that both liberals and Democrats were at best irrelevant to the future of the country, and more likely traitors. The sense of triumphal entitlement generated by twelve years of political dominance and six years of absolute control of national politics was palpable. Hence, for example, the Senate majority’s efforts to get rid of the filibuster — an action that only made sense if you assumed the Republican party would dominate the Senate for the indefinite future.
If this election goes as the current trends seem to indicate, there will be a lot of very angry, frustrated people out there. Their fires are being stoked daily by the McCain campaign and its surrogates. And I will bet any amount of money that those same commentators who tut-tutted the “Sore Losermen” of the 2000 election will suddenly discover a very different view on the legitimacy of election outcomes. People like my relative’s friend will only be able to understand the election outcome in terms of theft and cheating, because that’s the only narrative they’ll be exposed to. The traitors will be in charge, so far as she and millions of other voters are concerned.
Republicans haven’t been graceful winners these past fourteen years. There’s no reason to expect them to become graceful losers.
Posted: 5:55 am Mon October 20 2008 |
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tetar
October 20th, 2008 at 4:03 pmObama is said to have arrayed a huge bank of lawyers and other legal types to observe closely the election and its fall out. Whether this will matter is anyone’s guess, but it’s obvious both sides are bracing to charge the other with cheating. It’s also obvious a fair and honest vote simply is no longer a rational expectation, given the finagling, manipulation, and maneuvering going on behind the scenes to disenfranchise new voters and otherwise bar people from counting.
Political theater at its worst, really. Neither candidate means much for genuine change. You get Bush on steroids, Little Miss Theocrat, or you get Machine Politico and Mr. Drug War Czar Dude. What a damned fake choice.
David
October 21st, 2008 at 8:47 amI don’t think that’s quite fair to the Obama candidacy – I’ve been observing the race quite intently, albeit from Europe, and he does seem to bring a new perspective. Machine Politico? The guy is a political novice in terms of ‘number of years in the Washington snake pit’.
It is weird, though, this whole voter fraud thing. Where I live, we are legally obliged to vote. If you’re a citizen, you show up at the voting booth on election day and cast your vote. Of course, you need a valid ID to do so. But if you don’t have a valid ID you have more pressing problems than the vote
All in all it makes for such a vastly different approach that scenes where voters are removed from rosters, or people have to rally voters to show up, is just plain SF to me!