Hunkering down in the hours before
Hurricane Sandy makes landfall, I've been making calls to Florida as
part of MoveOn's get out the vote effort for President Obama. The wind is really picking up. the
lights have been flickering off occasionally and I've lost my
internet connection three times in the past couple of hours. Being 40 or so miles inland, though, I don't expect too much trouble from the
“megastorm”.
Along with their expressions of concern
for us in the Northeast, Floridians have given some practical advice
(“We always stocked up on peanut butter and bread to get us through
the outages.”) and, with a few exceptions, have expressed their
appreciation for MoveOn's efforts. Several of the voters were
optimistic about the outcome in Florida. Most thought it was too
close to say or thought their state might, unbelievably as it seems,
go for Romney. No doubt about it - the first debate took what had
been a comfortable lead for the President in the Sunshine State and
turned into horse race to the finish. Early voter turnout is high –
but that's even in the Tea Party counties so who knows what the early
voting portends.
With eight days until the election,
the race remains pretty much undecided nationally. The most recent poll
in Ohio, one of the Republican voter suppression states, has Obama
and Romeny tied among likely voters for the first time this election
– i.e., Obama's lead has been wiped out in this critical state.
The 2012 election will be as close as 2000. We need to hope and pray
that there won't be a similar result as in 2000 because a Romney-Ryan
victory will bring us back to the Bush era. We'd see a return to
both the domestic and foreign policies of those years. There is too
much at stake – health care, war and peace, the entire social
safety net, the Supreme Court composition, the economy...one could go
on and on. As Kevin Baker wrote in the October Harper's, “To
vote for a Mitt Romney—to vote for the modern right anywhere in the
West today—is an act of national suicide.”
The odds of Democrats regaining control
of the House appear negligible as evidenced by the surge in Romney's
share of the popular vote and the fact that nearly all Republican
House seats are in “safe” districts such as my own in western New
Jersey. Even if the Democrats maintain control of the Senate,
Republicans will use the filibuster to the great, detrimental effect
to the nation unless wiser heads than may be available in their party
prevail.
Meanwhile, newspapers have been
declaring for one candidate or the other – some predictably, some
not so. Perhaps the most surprising and disappointing endorsement
was the Des Moines Register's support for Romney. This is an
important endorsement in a swing state and is a turnabout for the
paper which normally supports Democratic candidates. The reason for
the endorsement, which came “after great internal debate”, was
because the majority of the editorial board thought Romney would work
better “across the aisle” with Congress. This has no basis in
fact if you look to Romney's record as Massachusetts' governor. In
addition and more importantly, it lets Congressional Republicans off
the hook for their obstructionist tactics that have seriously delayed
the recovery of the economy. Even with Republican cooperation,
recovery would have been difficult With their determination to
actively obstruct and to make Obama a one-term President, it became
impossible.
Perhaps the most predictable
endorsement was that of the New York Times. Just a couple of
excerpts from the NYT endorsement that I wish every voter would read
(or better, commit to memory) before casting his or her ballot...
“Mr. Obama prevented another Great
Depression. The economy was cratering when he took office in January
2009. By that June it was growing, and it has been ever since
(although at a rate that disappoints everyone), thanks in large part
to interventions Mr. Obama championed, like the $840 billion stimulus
bill. Republicans say it failed, but it created and preserved 2.5
million jobs and prevented unemployment from reaching 12 percent.
Poverty would have been much worse without the billions spent on
Medicaid, food stamps and jobless benefits.”
“[Mr. Obama] has ended the war in
Iraq. Mr. Romney, however, has said he would have insisted on leaving
thousands of American soldiers there. He has surrounded himself with
Bush administration neocons who helped to engineer the Iraq war, and
adopted their militaristic talk in a way that makes a Romney
administration’s foreign policies a frightening prospect.”
So what else is affecting the outcome
of this election? The unlimited money pouring into GOP coffers from
the Citizens United ruling will certainly make a difference.
And there is another, less understood impact of this infamous
decision: it overturned laws banning employers from discussing
political opinions with their employees. Employers have come out in
force advising their employees on the alleged consequences of a vote for
Barack Obama. Although companies cannot fire their workers for
voting a particular way, how would you like to receive political
advertising in your payroll envelope, as the US Chamber of Commerce
has been encouraging businesses to do?
Then there is the intimidation and
suppression effort mounted by Republican operatives. When they have
lost in the courts, they have resorted to tactics such as reported
earlier this month in Ohio urban areas where billboards sprang up
promising 3 years in prison and a $10,000 fine for “voter fraud”.
Next door, in Republican-held Pennsylvania, there has been little official dissemination of the information that due to the recent
court injunction, one does not need voter id to vote in this
election.
Finally, of course, there is the race
issue. Four years after the United State commendably elected its
first African-American President, we have definitely not entered a
post-racial era as some had hoped. Racism is even more widespread
now than in 2008. Reporting on recent Associated Press surveys
conducted by university researchers, Daniel Politi writes in Slate:
“A full 51 percent of Americans explicitly express anti-black
prejudice, up from 48 percent in 2008... When an implicit racial
attitudes test is used the number increases to 56 percent, compared
to 49 percent four years ago. The AP surveys... ultimately found that
President Obama could lose a net 2 percentage points of the popular
vote due to anti-black attitudes.” I can believe that - several
voters that I've spoken to in the swing states said that they know
people whose sole reason for not voting for the President is that he
is black.
I'm not sure how much good the calls
I've been making will do. The people I've been speaking to are good
people – some with stories that would break your heart. Their
lives will be greatly affected by a Romney-Ryan victory - much more
so than my own. So I'll keep making the calls for them and to them.
Win or lose on November 6, I'd like to feel that I've done all that I
could to help prevent a Republican takeover of the Executive Branch
and the disaster, or in Kevin Baker's words, “the national
suicide”, that would entail.
Oh yeah, just so there is no doubt, I
endorse Barack Obama for the President.
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