(More) Riders On the Storm
Aug. 29th, 2008 10:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ed_rexI'm a smart boy and love to be right. In '79, I argued with my dad about the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. "It'll be their Vietnam," I said and my dad, a smart man but one sometimes given to romanticism, said no, the Russians want to free Afgan women, they want to spread literacy — they're going to win this thing.
I was 14 years old and knew nothing of the barbarism of Muslim fundamentalism; but I did know that you can't impose civilization through the barrel of a gun, especially when "civilization" is utterly entwined with Great Power imperialism.
Frankly, if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have hoped to be wrong; but that hope wouldn't have changed my prediction.
And so it is now: I really hope I'm wrong about what I think will happen during the November presidential elections in the United States of America.
Relatively speaking, I like Barack Obama. Among a tiny minority of US senators, he voted against the American invasion of Iraq, at the time an act of great political courage. He strikes me as a man of integrity and intelligence; a political realist but not a cynic. I think an Obama presidency would be good for the United States and for the world.
But he's not going to win the election.
He's not even going to come close.
Back during one of the early primaries, I predicted he was going to beat Clinton ("Hillary" to those of you who call some public figures by their first name and others by their last). I said that America had changed, and race was no longer the factor it once was.
I was wrong. Race is no longer (much of) a factor for Democrat activists. Towards the end of the primaries, after it was clear that Clinton couldn't win, but before she dropped out, I began to wonder about the US as a whole and, quietly, began to think there was no way Obama could be elected president.
A recent poll convinced me I was right. John McCain's cynical but brilliant choice of a woman, as his running-mate was the master-stroke.
If the CNN story, that 30% of Clinton's supporters are going to vote for McCain, is true (or even close to it), Obama doesn't have a chance in hell.
The elephant in the room is race, is skin colour. Half-white, Barack Obama is still "black" and there are one hell of a lot of Americans who — no matter what they say in public or even what they tell themselves — will be unable to pull a lever for a "nigger" as president.
Couple that with the aging second-generation cohort of feminists who thought — it's time, damn it! — that Hillary Clinton was going to take the White House on behalf of the "second sex" and who will vote for anyone but Obama out of spite, and the fix is on.
McCain may be a liar; McCain may not know much about the economy; McCain might even be in the early stages of senility, but he's not black — he's white.
And the United States' racial divide will reveal itself in the voting booth. John McCain is going to have the largest presidential landslide since the war criminal, common criminal and general liar Richard Nixon destroyed George McGovern is '72.
This will be a disaster for the people of the United States and for the people of the world. I don't want it to happen. But unless McCain has a stroke onstage during one of the presidential debates, he's going to walk away with the election.
By naming a woman as his running-mate, he's guaranteed it.
I haven't yet watched Obama's acceptance speech; once I have, it's conceivable I'll take back everything I said above.
And I hope I do.
But I'm not holding my breath.
God help us all.
I was 14 years old and knew nothing of the barbarism of Muslim fundamentalism; but I did know that you can't impose civilization through the barrel of a gun, especially when "civilization" is utterly entwined with Great Power imperialism.
Frankly, if I'd known then what I know now, I'd have hoped to be wrong; but that hope wouldn't have changed my prediction.
And so it is now: I really hope I'm wrong about what I think will happen during the November presidential elections in the United States of America.
Relatively speaking, I like Barack Obama. Among a tiny minority of US senators, he voted against the American invasion of Iraq, at the time an act of great political courage. He strikes me as a man of integrity and intelligence; a political realist but not a cynic. I think an Obama presidency would be good for the United States and for the world.
But he's not going to win the election.
He's not even going to come close.
Back during one of the early primaries, I predicted he was going to beat Clinton ("Hillary" to those of you who call some public figures by their first name and others by their last). I said that America had changed, and race was no longer the factor it once was.
I was wrong. Race is no longer (much of) a factor for Democrat activists. Towards the end of the primaries, after it was clear that Clinton couldn't win, but before she dropped out, I began to wonder about the US as a whole and, quietly, began to think there was no way Obama could be elected president.
A recent poll convinced me I was right. John McCain's cynical but brilliant choice of a woman, as his running-mate was the master-stroke.
If the CNN story, that 30% of Clinton's supporters are going to vote for McCain, is true (or even close to it), Obama doesn't have a chance in hell.
The elephant in the room is race, is skin colour. Half-white, Barack Obama is still "black" and there are one hell of a lot of Americans who — no matter what they say in public or even what they tell themselves — will be unable to pull a lever for a "nigger" as president.
Couple that with the aging second-generation cohort of feminists who thought — it's time, damn it! — that Hillary Clinton was going to take the White House on behalf of the "second sex" and who will vote for anyone but Obama out of spite, and the fix is on.
McCain may be a liar; McCain may not know much about the economy; McCain might even be in the early stages of senility, but he's not black — he's white.
And the United States' racial divide will reveal itself in the voting booth. John McCain is going to have the largest presidential landslide since the war criminal, common criminal and general liar Richard Nixon destroyed George McGovern is '72.
This will be a disaster for the people of the United States and for the people of the world. I don't want it to happen. But unless McCain has a stroke onstage during one of the presidential debates, he's going to walk away with the election.
By naming a woman as his running-mate, he's guaranteed it.
I haven't yet watched Obama's acceptance speech; once I have, it's conceivable I'll take back everything I said above.
And I hope I do.
But I'm not holding my breath.
God help us all.
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Re: Don't Know Much 'Bout Geography ...
Date: 2008-08-31 03:20 am (UTC)It stands for Cover Your Ass.
One can always check the Acronym Finder. (I use it a lot.) In brief, Americans have become enamored of Political Correctness to the point folks really do have to Watch What They Say. It's pretty much instinctive by this point, and one often uses 'preemptive' statements to deflate the expected suspicions.
So I point this up by doing it aloud, so to speak.
Me, a racist? Nahhh. (In truth, my wife is a non-white immigrant, so if anyone called me that it would probably fall flat, but not necessarily.)
One reason Obama is neck-and-neck with McCain in the polls (when in every recent election, the Democrat was far ahead at this stage), is that people have gotten past his soaring rhetoric and begun to examine the specifics. You cannot please everyone!
(Our election races being vastly longer than Canada's, folks habitually wait until the final weeks, if they bother at all.)
I'm a non-typical policy wonk, who actually did work in Washington, DC for 8 months.
Re: Don't Know Much 'Bout Geography ...
Date: 2008-08-31 03:26 am (UTC)Shallow? You bet it is.
Bad joke follows: Welcome to the modern world of the universal franchise.
Re: Don't Know Much 'Bout Geography ...
Date: 2008-08-31 06:08 pm (UTC)Yeah, that just makes you a racist in denial. :)
One reason Obama is neck-and-neck with McCain in the polls (when in every recent election, the Democrat was far ahead at this stage), is that people have gotten past his soaring rhetoric and begun to examine the specifics.
Granted. And I admit that I haven't done my home-work in terms of policy. As a Canadian — and one on the left of this country's political spectrum, to boot — my main concerns are with such big-picture questions as whether Obama is more or less likely than McCain to, say, start more wars of aggression or continue to ignore (what I believe is) the fact of global warming and habitat destruction. (And I'd like to know how McCain intends to end the US's dependence on foreign oil — it sounds like an awfully tall order, although I suppose getting to the moon in a decade also sounded close to impossible in 1960.)