Friday, October 03, 2008

Diseased Democracy?


What would an Obama landslide look like on November 4th? Anything better than a one vote victory.

The odds are really stacked against the guy. First of all there's the Cracker vote, the racists who wouldn't elect a black man dogcatcher much less president. Funny how racism is outlawed, just not at the ballot box.

Then there's the famous Republican vote-rigging machine, the backroom apparatus that played such an enormous role in saddling America with the disastrous administration of the past eight years.

John McCain back when he was principled and sane, fell victim to the Lee Atwater/Karl Rove tactics of push pollers who used what sounded like telephone polls to spread rumours that McCain had fathered an illegitimate black daughter. w. Bush of course said it was awful and washed his hands of it. He did nothing to stop it even though he could have and, if he'd had any respect for his country's democracy, would have.

Now it's John McCain's chance to stop the push pollers furiously spreading their telephone lies about Obama and, naturally, McSame 2008 says he has nothing to do with it. From The Guardian:

"Victims claim the fake pollsters work insinuations into their questions, designed to damage Obama. Those targeted in swing states such as Florida, Ohio and Pennsylvania include Jews, Christian evangelicals, Catholics and Latinos.
One of those to protest, Debbie Minden, who lives in a predominantly Jewish neighbourhood, Squirrel Hill, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, told the Guardian that the pollster had begun by asking her the usual questions about her background and who she would vote for.


But the pollster went on to ask Minden, who is Jewish, how she would vote if she knew that Obama was supported by Hamas, the Palestinian militant group that runs Gaza and was responsible for most of the suicide bombings against Israel. "It is scare tactics. It is terribly underhand," she said.

An Obama campaign organiser in one of the swing states said there had been lots of complaints about push polling in his patch. Callers said questions frequently included a reference to the widespread belief that Obama is a Muslim, even though he has repeatedly said he is a Christian.

The organiser said another question was: would you be less likely to vote for Obama if Israel had to give up all of Jerusalem? "They make this shit up. They are good at it. The unassuming listener will not realise it is untrue," he said."

Push polling is just one mechanism used to subvert democracy. For two years at least there have been efforts underway to prevent Democratic supporters from voting. Vote caging seems to be the tool of choice this year.

Now in a nation that claims to cherish its democracy more than anywhere else, that holds its democracy as the ideal for all other nations, efforts to subvert that democracy ought to spark outrage at the party level, with the candidates and with voters. The people who are doing this are known. You can't keep this secret. Yet those who know stay silent while the dirty work is done for them.

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