And finally, don't be conned by the last minute Romney ads: Obama's record on the economy and jobs far better than Romney's as governor

With the election going down to the wire, the general consensus is that the state of Washington is safe for Barack Obama. But try telling that to the Romney camp; it continues to air television spots targeting the demographic that it believes can turn the tide for them, here and elsewhere: White women.  Despite Obama’s supposed lead among women, this is certainly not the case with this particularly demographic; an ABC News/Washington Post tracking poll dated October 24 showed a polarized racial gap that included both white men and white women: White men favored Romney 65-32, while white women favored Romney by a narrower but still significant  53-44 percent. To me, this is hardly surprising; while men try to “rationalize” their prejudices, women tend to express theirs pure and unalloyed even by hypocrisy. 

What is a bit of a “surprise” to me is the reasoning. Well, actually not surprising, given the apparently low-information quality of the voter. One television ad featured a half-dozen white women who claimed to regularly vote Democrat before but now were supporting the Romney/Ryan ticket. Of course, in 2008 the John McCain campaign actively tried to siphon-off disgruntled Hillary Clinton supporters, and didn’t need to try in some cases—such as former Ms. magazine editor Elaine Lafferty, who says things like “white men are doomed” yet advised the old white man on how to defeat the “inadequate black male” by attracting more self-absorbed white women like herself. 

This time, the excuse for ignoring the Obama administration’s women-friendly policies is that he did not “deliver” on his “promise” of "change." What does this mean? That you want to return to the same old bad policies? At any rate, this doesn’t refer to social issues, but to who is responsible in regard to the federal deficit and the economy (it is certainly debatable which party is actually more at fault--recalling that there was a budget surplus during the last year of the Clinton administration, before Bush's war and massive tax cuts for the rich).  Thus the Romney TV spots are banking on the fact that some voters have not been paying attention, no thanks to a media more interested in hyperbole than facts. White men are presumably already hardened on their positions on these matters and why they have come to be, but white women are perceived as still malleable, even now on the eve of the election.

This might not be the case if CNN and the mainstream media in general had not given Republicans a free pass on their stated intention from Day One was to prevent a second Obama term—and that meant deliberately sabotaging his agenda. One may recall that Ronald Reagan won with a bare majority of the popular vote in 1980, but despite the fact that the Democrats retained control of the House of Representatives, there was the belief that Reagan had a “right” to expect his election “promises” to pass during his first “100 days.” On the other hand, despite his substantial margin of victory in the general election, the minority Republicans in the U.S. Senate decided that there would be no “100 days” for Obama’s clear mandate of “change.” Although Obama’s auto bailout was an unqualified success, he was forced to significantly water down his economic stimulus package to satisfy two “moderate” Northeastern Republican senators, and he had to battle even members of his own party to pass a health care reform bill that did not receive a single Republican vote, despite the fact that much of it was similar to what Republicans supported in 1993. 

In fact, many of Obama’s initiatives, such as tax breaks for small businesses, were deliberately thwarted by Republicans simply because they did not want him to succeed—and that meant the country as well. Recall also that Obama had a “grand deal” with John Boehner on a debt reduction plan, but this was sabotaged simply because Boehner had the spine of a jellyfish when it came to standing-up to the Tea Party element in the House; partisanship was more important than the good of the nation. And today, Romney is trying to blackmail voters by saying that House Republicans will never work with Obama; what that should mean is that Tea Party Republicans and their anti-Medicare and Social Security agenda (championed by Romney’s running mate, Paul Ryan) need to take an election hit; while the 2008-2010 Democratic Congress was extraordinary in its efforts to make right a country that had gone seriously wrong, the 2010-2012 was the least productive in recent memory, and the entire blame is on do-nothing Republicans and its Tea Party cohort entirely devoid of ideas (except bad ideas), because it takes too much thinking.

And thinking is what, at this late date, voters need to do. In a series of graphs in a report last September, Business Insider showed that the economy and job growth has in fact improved markedly since both were in free fall in late 2008 and early 2009. It has been reported that in the last 6 months, more jobs have been created than in 8 years of the Bush administration—and as mentioned before, Romney has no “record” as a job creator and Massachusetts' economy suffered immensely from his indifference; just because he made a lot of money for himself doesn’t mean this egomaniac and class bigot is eager to create “competition." Any fair comparison between Obama’s record as president and Romney’s as governor shows that Obama’s accomplishments are far more substantial. He should be rewarded with reelection.