So here's my big, bold election forecast: Obama is going to win and it's not even going to be close. Landslide, baby. McCain is going to be the Republican answer to Walter Mondale. Won't even carry his own state.
Obama will also have a huge majority in both the House and Senate, though I doubt a filibuster proof Senate majority with only a third of the seats changing hands. So the Republocrats might still be able to filibuster, but Depublicans will have a mandate. And yeah, the press will love up on them.
I can already hear Frank Deford's pompous commentaries full of the pretense of holding Obama accountable. Really, he doesn't have to even write new material, he can just do a search & replace on all his Clinton era hack jobs. It already sounds as weary to me as his tirades against W., the 'very lame duck' as Deford put it in one of his recent editorials. It's worn out before he even says it.
Because, listen up, confessions of a third party loser. Honest, last time I voted for one of the 'two party system' was 1988, and if there'd been a Socialist on the ballot, Dukakis would not have gotten my vote. I was 18, and pretty well convinced that Bush I was going to draft me and send me to Central America.
Since then, I've voted Libertarian every time. And I'll do so again tomorrow because voting for McCain or Obama is voting for more of the same. I know Bob Barr will be lucky to get three percent of the vote, but that doesn't mean I'm throwing my vote away. It only means 97% of you are.
But to get back to the confessional part. When Newt and the Gang took over Congress in '94, the Contract With American thing? I can't say I voted Republican because I remember casting my vote for Grant Stauffer, a Hemp Tour type who was the LP candidate in my district that election. But when they won, I thought, Well, they're going to do some fucked up shit, but at least government spending is finally going to slow down.
They promptly repeated the cycle of abuse. Newt got a totally legit book deal, one that looks a lot like ones Senator Clinton has had, and when the press squawked Newt's crew fed him to the pigs. They pretended to 'shut down' the government in a bogus smack-down with Bill Clinton, Rush Limbaugh enjoyed it all almost as much as a fistful of Oxycontin, and before you could say Lewinsky, the Republican Congress was spending money like Paris Hilton on a cocaine binge.
So Obama and his Congress, don't be so surprised when we're still in Iraq four years from now. Get ready for a big recession, because we're already in it and there's fuckall these goons can do to stop it. They might make it worse, but we might get lucky and they might not find too many ways to do that. And your taxes, whatever you make, are not going anywhere but up.
In other words, it'll be just like McCain won, except Sean Hannity will hold his breath until he turns blue.
If I'm wrong and Barrack gets great things accomplished and manages not to outweigh them with awful things, I'll be ecstatic to be proven wrong. If that's what you're expecting, don't wait under water.
1 comment:
Whether or not Frank Deford is right about accountability, I think Obama as president might face as much friction from some Democrats as from most Republicans. For one thing -- and I say this as someone fairly far left (I don't mind the word socialism, for example, because I think we've been practicing it for quite a while) -- I find Obama much closer to the center than I am.
In fact, I think one of his strengths as a leader is that he isn't a leftie and as president wouldn't be a knee-jerk liberal. For example, I don't think he'd pull us out of Iraq as precipitously as some assume, and I think he'd make good on his intentions to shift more of the tax burden back on the wealthy and make some kind of improvements in health coverage for all Americans.
It wouldn't be as much as I would like, but that's OK. I'm willing to settle for small steps, but it wouldn't be enough for others on my end of the political spectrum. Still, I think he'd stand up to that side of the party because I see him as a tough guy. I admire that in McCain, and I think it's also there in Obama.
(By the way, I met Frank Deford in the 1980s in Maine when I was running a bureau for a newspaper there and he stopped in during a visit to his mother, who had retired in our area. He must have been on vacation because we all talked for a long time. Well, he talked for a long time, but I found it all interesting. I admire his writing and had the same feeling about his conversation. The guy talks in paragraphs.)
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