Blogroll, Congress, Ohio
On Oct. 17, 2004, John Kerry’s victory over George Bush appeared to be all but assured:
With just 16 days to go until the vote, the race couldn’t be tighter.
Polls suggest a dead heat. Even Republican organizers concede the Democratic senator has benefited from his performance in the three presidential debates.
And a Washington Post poll shows Kerry with a significant lead in important states that could decide the outcome of the election. The poll found Kerry held a 53 per cent to 43 per cent lead among likely voters in 13 such states.
While Kerry was campaigning in two of those states on Sunday – Ohio and Florida – [George] Bush took the day off, choosing instead to concentrate on a major speech on terrorism he is scheduled to deliver in New Jersey on Monday.
Analysts say it is the handful of crucial swing states, like Ohio, Pennsylvania and Florida that will be most important on Nov. 2. Those states will be heavily targeted by both campaigns in the closing weeks of the race.
Back then, it was Swiftboating, along with a concerted effort by the GOP to suppress or steal votes, particularly in Ohio, that handed victory to Bush.
This year, it appears that the McCain campaign’s Swiftboating tactics — lying about Obama’s associations with William Ayers and ACORN and its hatefilled robocalls in which sub rosa messaging links Obama to terrorism — as well as concerted efforts to steal votes that are undoubtedly underway, that will likely hand the presidency to John McCain.
Saying something does not make it true.
http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2004/Pres/Maps/Oct20.html
Kerry was losing Ohio, and barely ahead in Florida. Florida swung, and that was the difference.
Just saying something is not true doesn’t make it false:
http://www.electiontruth.org/
I’m inclined to agree with Zeb. While we shouldn’t take anything or granted, right now the landscape is very different from 2004.
It’s a tough fight and Obama needs a real landslide to overcome the vote theft for sure. Some things have changed this time around, though. The courts seem to be different … Check out http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6534 for the latest news about the GOP registration group YPM, real voter fraud [head of YPM arrested & charged] and fraudulent re-registration of Dems to ReThuglican party dating back at least to ‘04.
I hope the shit’s about to hit the fan.
I think Robert Bauer, Gen. Counsel to the Obama Campaign, is a much better lawyer than those who came before. I have more hope this year.
That’s why Obama is lawyering up: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601087&sid=a.hk4HvCkpiE&refer=home
Thanks for the link, Trish!
Michael McDonald said there is scant evidence of large numbers of people fraudulently casting ballots.â€We all know the stories of dead people voting in Chicago,” he said. “We don’t have zombies showing up at polling places and casting ballots.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
That’s true, however the zombies, pretending to be journalists, have been in control of the media for far too long :) Maybe they’ve been embarrassed into attempting to do a better job. ?? Hope springs eternal.
Your ability to avoid seeing what’s right in front of you is astounding. The article says, “With just 16 days to go until the vote, the race couldn’t be tighter. Polls suggest a dead heat.” You say, “On Oct. 17, 2004, John Kerry’s victory over George Bush appeared to be all but assured.”
Kerry led in 10 of 13 swing states. Guess what? He won in most of the swing states. The fact is, Bush only needed to win two of those states, Ohio and Florida.
There’s a couple of other factors that you haven’t considered: Kerry was a very weak candidate with a tin ear who proclaimed that he would fight a “more sensitive war on terror.” Bush was a very effective campaigner. But Obama is an extremely strong candidate who doesn’t make many gaffes, while McCain is an exceptionally weak candidate.
As the article indicates, at the time it was written John Kerry had just caught up after being substantially behind. Obama had a lead going into the debates, and won all three of them handily.
Finally, the Swift Boat attacks were part of a sustained, coordinated attack on Kerry’s service record that went virtually unanswered. The ACORN and Bill Ayers charges are desperate, last-minute attacks that haven’t resonated at all with either Democrats or independent voters. They’re part of a scattershot approach that has included attacks on Jeremiah Wright and charges that Obama is a secret Muslim.
The most recent attacks don’t resonate because people have come to expect unsubstantiated, self-contradictory smears from the McCain campaign. The fact that McCain didn’t mention Bill Ayers until the Jeremiah Wright attacks fell flat shows that McCain doesn’t really believe that Obama’s association with Ayers is a big deal, and I think that the public has been able to grasp that.
I think it’s good to resist complacence, but I don’t think that irrational pessimism is an effective antidote.
Michael McDonald also said: “What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away what seems to be.”
;-D
Hey [Steely] Dan, good one! :D
Thanks for your comment, Gordo.
[...] getting pretty sick of the irrational pessimism of some liberals. Jon Ponder provides an example of the sort of pessimism I’m talking about: On Oct. 17, 2004, John Kerry’s victory over George Bush appeared to be all but assured: With [...]
Damn! Is that what that Michael McDonald song said? All this time I’ve wondered. I just go “da-da-da-da” through that part. Thanks for the translation, Dan!
fact; the only people that were arrested, tried, convicted and did a stint in jail in 2004 were democratic operatives in michigan. hey, i live in new jersey where we are use to democrats stealing elections. what i’m not sure about is are you democrats angry that republicans have gotten as good as you in this matter or if you are really angry that anyone would steal an election. so which is it? wrong all the time or wrong only when republicans do it?
Jim -
Wrong all the time.
Mike
mike,, i agree
Gordo – I’m see what the Obama campaign says it sees, ie., not the landslide we’re all hoping for — and that the GOP deserves — yet. I see good numbers for Obama now, but I also know that in every election, even landslides, the race tightens at the end. There’s no reason to assume it won’t retrench this year to the patterns of 2000 and 2004.
If so, that gives Obama the states Gore and Kerry won and McCain the states Bush won, and puts the final decision once again either in Florida or Ohio, and neither of those will be easy wins. Obama has a lead in Florida in many polls, but the GOP still controls the state, as well as the US Supreme Court, so a recount would be just as hard-fought as it was eight years ago. (Plus, there’s an anti-gay proposition on the ballot there like there was in Ohio in 2004, so the GOP’s base has a reason beyond voting for Pallen to go to the polls.)
Ohio is controlled by Dems but, as we have seen in the past weeks especially, it is also home to some of the loudest, most unapologetic racists in the nation. McCain is ahead, though not by much, in just about every poll I’ve seen.
The Republicans are even more desperate this year, because if the Dems take over the Executive in January, much could be revealed that has been kept secret, not just in the past seven years, but in the records from the Reagan/Bush and Bush/Quayle admins that Bush II has sealed indefinitely. If those records are unsealed, and especially if they implicate St. Ronnie in the treasonous activities of his employees, it might well drive the stake through the GOP’s undead heart.
The 2004 election should have been a referendum on George Bush, who was then, as now, the Worst President Ever. I certainly wasn’t enthralled with Kerry, but he would have been a better president sound asleep than Bush has been at his meager wide-awake best.
In the last two weeks of the 2004 campaign, Bush/Rove unleashed the hounds — lying, stealing and fear-mongering — and it worked very effectively. Obama is a much better candidate than Kerry, and McCain is much worse than Bush. But, with two weeks to go in the 2008 campaign, I think anything more than cautious optimism for now is risky.
Irrational pessimism? Gore, Kerry, and I all had a good chuckle over that one.
I hate to break it to y’all, but the original poster is probably right. This time around it will not be as easy for the R’s to steal the election, but several things have changed that mean it MUST be a landslide for us to pull this off:
1.Kerry lawyered up, too. Fat lot of good this did us. The media will be in full hue and cry for a concession “for the good of the country†after a close finish/McCain “stunner.” We’re already seeing the preludes to this in the framing of this “close race” despite the polls. Should it appear that this was a close win/steal for M/P, Obama will concede almost immediately.
2.Vote suppression is in full swing and, unlike 2004, and has had three solid years of DOJ manipulation, and has the HAVA smokescreen for R governors and Secretaries of state to enshrine e-fraud systems in every state.
3.As in 2004, winning most of the swing states will not be enough. BHO MUST win them all.
4.A sustained, coordinated Swiftboat-type character assassination is not necessary this time around. Given the racist and ignorant nature of the bulk of the electorate, for millions of American voters, BHO has a built-in SET of character flaws; his skin color and his Muslim name. Snowballs roll down hill, racists get to the bottom faster. M/P robocalls are the tiny snowball that can start an avalanche of hate rolling (a mixed metaphor, I know).
5.Real or not, the Bradley effect is already being invoked by the MSM, and will ultimately be the post-mortem explanation for the “stunning†victory of M/P. Despite false protestations, nobody will really doubt that racism and religious freakery dominates our country. It’s pre-fab, self fulfilling spin. It may work.
6.There’s still time for an October Surprise. As Saint Ronnie showed, they can be spectacular in their depravity and scope. Expect the unexpected.
We’ve got an uphill battle at best. Keep your guard up and spread the word. We need a landslide.
http://www.opednews.com/articles/A-McCain-Win-Will-Be-The-by-David-Swanson-081020-212.html
A McCain Win Will Be Theft; Resistance Is Planned
OpEd News; David Swanson
If your television declares John McCain the president elect on the evening of November 4th, your television will be lying. You should immediately pick up your pre-packed bags and head straight to the White House in Washington, D.C., which we will surround and shut down until this attempt at a third illegitimate presidency is reversed.
A McCain “win” will not be illegitimate because I disagree with his policies, but because he himself has rendered it illegitimate. He and his campaign and allied supporters have sought to illegally remove hundreds of thousands of voters from the rolls, fraudulently registered people as Republicans without their knowledge and against their will, obstructed voter registration drives, falsely warned students against voting where they attend school, falsely accused community groups of voter registration fraud, falsely alleged the widespread existence of voter fraud, and encouraged supporters to falsely believe McCain’s opponent is a foreign terrorist through speeches, recorded phone messages, and flyers. Already in early voting in a number of states there have been cases of votes on electronic machines visibly flipping to McCain or McKinney when intended for Obama. We will see McCain supporters on November 4th challenging people’s right to vote, seeking to force people to vote on provisional ballots, and seeking to have provisional ballots discarded. And we will see electronic vote counts wildly out of step with the most recent polls, although not with exit polls — which we will be denied any access to unless they have been “adjusted” to match the official counts. [more at link]
““““““““`
Newspaper endorsements – 124 Obama / 42 McPoot
http://www.opednews.com/articles/Why-Obama-s-Shocking-Lands-by-Greg-Mitchell-081021-788.html
Why Obama’s Shocking Landslide in Newspaper Endorsements Really Matters // by Greg Mitchell
Umm.. sure.. real rational, pal. Head up to the White House on Nov 5th. In fact, maybe you should try climbing the fence so the secret service will take your moronic self out.