Reelecting Obama will send a "message" to Republicans: This isn't a "game" where they choose who "wins" in this society

No comment on football this week, except to say that the Minnesota Vikings lost to the Seattle Seahawks by following the age old adage “If it works, run a million miles away from it.” So what if Adrian Peterson was running through the Seahawk rush defense like a chainsaw through butter; winning the game wasn’t as important as the failed attempt to get the pathetic passing game off life support. Still, it is just a “game” of pampered billionaire owners and millionaire players. 

Unfortunately, some people seem to think that the presidential election is just a “game.” I’m not referring to the many millions of people who know that what is at stake is moving forward with Barack Obama, not diving headforemost back into the conditions that led this country into the cesspit it found itself in four years ago. The people who do seem to think this is a “game” are Republican desperadoes like Dick Morris and Karl Rove, both of whom, if there was any justice in this world, would be convicted felons. I happened to be surfing the AM radio dial on Sunday, and on some right-wing political talk radio show (the truth is that such programming dominates the AM airwaves; even Seattle’s KOMO news radio is perversely right-wing), when I encountered Morris—a former Clinton aid turned Fox News huckster and author of such thoughtful, reasoned tomes as Revolt! How to Defeat Obama and Repeal His Socialist Programs and Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want To Kill Talk Radio, the Do-Nothing Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us...And What To Do About It—who was busy boasting that the election was not as close as polls suggested, and Romney would win the popular vote by 5-10 percentage points, and by a landslide margin in the Electoral College. He went on to say that his friend Karl Rove was guaranteeing a Romney victory in Ohio—again despite the fact that most polls show Obama ahead by at least 3 points. 

Now, it would seem suspicious that polls that appear to show that the popular vote is a virtual dead heat and the Electoral College count still favors Obama would be dismissed with such ease by Republican “strategists.” This may merely be a subtle effort to fool people into not voting, but as we discussed before, in recent elections the Republicans have shown no respect for the democratic process, and have behaved like Third World tin-pot dictators. Rove has been the master of ceremonies behind many instances of anti-democratic and plainly criminal actions. As far back as 1970, Rove was making Richard Nixon look like an amateur; in what he called a “youthful prank,” he broke into the campaign office of Alan Dixon, who was running as a Democrat for Illinois State Treasurer, where he printed phony fliers that promised youths and the homeless "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing" in order to embarrass Dixon with the bad publicity from campaign events that attracted such “supporters.” 

It was also suspected that the prosecution for bribery of former Alabama Gov. Don Siegelman was orchestrated by Rove to remove a creditable Democratic alternative to the Republican hegemony in that state (Dana Simpson, a witness who testified to this, later found her house burned down, and then nearly killed with a private investigator drove her car off the road). The Valerie Plame case, the illegal disappearance of over 2 million Bush era e-mails, and the firing of federal prosecutors who did not pursue Democrats as instructed were all Rove initiatives. Worse is the case of Michael Connell, a Republican consultant-turned-whistleblower who claimed to have intimate knowledge of Rove’s involvement in vote-rigging in Ohio during the 2004 election. Connell sought witness protection after allegedly receiving threats from Rove. Before he could talk, Connell died in what many consider a highly suspicious airplane crash in in 2008. 

I only mention this because it demonstrates to what extent Republican operatives like Rove—whose Super Pac “American Crossroads” attracts huge quantities of money from anonymous donors—are utterly ruthless and even criminal in their efforts to rig elections and undermine the democratic process. If Rove can “guarantee” Ohio for Romney—much like Ohio was “promised” for George Bush in 2004—he must be privy to or actively involved in vote-rigging. Since few Americans even want to imagine that this country’s electoral process can be compromised in the ways some have been suggested—much like no one wanted to believe that Ronald Reagan had any knowledge of the treasonable (not “patriotic”) Iran-Contra affair—the only remedy is to out-vote the Republican vote-riggers. 

There have been other instances of blatant undermining of democracy by Republicans even in these last few days, such as the Romney campaign falsely claiming that Wisconsin voters  who have felony convictions cannot vote, when they can after serving their sentences, and Ohio’s Republican secretary of state—John Husted—at the last moment changing provisional ballot rules that were already settled, making voters rather than election officials responsible for insuring everything is filled-out correctly—and then using the flimsiest pretext to toss them. Billboard owner Clear Channel was also forced by minority activists to remove threatening billboards (paid for by “anonymous” parties) in their neighborhoods meant to intimidate them from voting. 

But back to Dick Morris. I listened to him say that Obama was going to lose because he didn’t have a “message.” This is odd, because for four years all we’ve been hearing about from the right-wing media is Obama’s “socialist” and “communist” agenda, and that requires a philosophical and ideological “message”—even if it is a false one concocted by Obama’s countless enemies, most of whom are motivated by their racial attitudes and what they regard as racial politics and policies. For a president who doesn’t have a “message,” Obama has certainly inspired a great deal of responses to something. Political commentator John Avlon recently wrote that 

A relentless drumbeat of demonizing the president gave rise to all sorts of dark conspiracy theories, driven by the conviction that the first African-American president of the United States was somehow un-American. Hating Obama became a profitable cottage industry, with the publication of at least 89 different obsessively anti-Obama books -- more than twice the number that were directed at President George W. Bush by the end of his first term. Unhinged ideas seeped perilously close to the mainstream, to the point that the gap between partisan narrative and actual facts seems cavernous and finds fellow Americans divided beyond reason…This has real civic cost. A president who has presided over a doubling of the stock market is called socialist or even communist. A president who ordered the killing of Osama bin Laden is seen by some as secret Islamist-sympathizer. And perhaps most important, a president whose actual record leads respected nonpartisan political scientists at the VoteView blog to say "President Obama is the most moderate Democratic president since the end of World War II" is instead seen as a far-left liberal. A reality check is overdue.

Obama does in fact have a message, and it is that this country is in desperate need of confronting the dangers of health care cost and availability spiraling out of control or out of reach—the reform of which Romney’s only answer is to “kill it.” Obama’s message is that we cannot go back to a time when the rich thought only of getting richer rather than putting their extra largesse to work helping to insure this country met its obligations to all of its citizens. His message is that we must, finally, take seriously the reality that this country is operating on borrowed time when it comes to dependence on fossil fuels, and we must start working on alternatives now. His message is that people—not a few favored “elites”—are the backbone of this country, and it is time that corporate fascists like the Koch brothers are forced to respect that. 

But more than that, a message must be sent to the Republicans that the hyperpartisanship that they have been practicing—even to the extent that they will “kill” policies they have supported in the past—has run its course and will not be tolerated. The citizens of this country want real action, not the self-destructive actions that blind hatred has inspired, and no amount of money can prevent truth from winning out.  Distorting and suppressing the will of the people, as the Republicans have been are attempting to do, only shows their contempt for every American. This election, we must show them who is “boss”—the people, or Romney’s self-privileged class.