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Nov. 3rd, 2008 02:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
glauconsix months ago, almost to the day, I wrote the following:
dude, the democrats could run a salad crouton again mccain and win in november.
unfortunately, they don't have a salad crouton in the primaries, but I still think mccain is about the weakest candidate the republicans have fielded since gerald ford. there are so many ways to attack him: the Crazed Warmonger, the Hypocrite, the Big Meanie, the Adulterer, the Corrupt Crook. and those are just the ones that seem fairly likely. there's still the Manchurian Candidate and the Miscegenating Racist if one really needs to fight dirty.
and the serious crazies on the Right (which, even by my probably unduly forgiving standards, is a pretty large percentage of the total) are pretty lukewarm about him. at least one of the right-wing racist wackjob mailing lists I'm on has been ranting merrily about which third-party candidate they should get behind on accounta McCain not being enough of a nutbar for them.
but beyond any of that, my feeling is that his main undoing is going to be the fact that he's losing his marbles. I think at this point his brain has about the wattage of Ronald Reagan's circa 1986. the kid gloves the press has been using on him haven't brought this to light, but once there's an actual candidate on the Dem side, the swing voters will start actually noticing when he talks (at about the same time that he suddenly has to do so more often) and then the senile cat will be trying to claw its way out of the bag but failing 'cuz it's, you know, senile.
Hillary could win.
Obama could win.
Kerry could win.
hell, I think even Kucinich would have had a decent chance if he could have gotten through the primaries.
personally, I'm still pulling for a crouton to emerge from a brokered convention.
--
a few things have happened since then that I wouldn't have necessarily expected. for example, I did not predict the extent to which mccain would happily jump in bed with the wacko wing of the republican party. if I'd done the math a little further, I probably would have arrived at that one though.
one that I'd have been less likely to predict was the extent to which the real conservatives in the party have renounced mccain in droves: george will, colin powell, christopher buckley, even charles krauthammer sorta. I feel that said renunciations happened in large part because of some of the loony shit he pulled in the course of the campaign, and in that sense I suppose it all derives from the "losing his marbles" theory that I advanced six months ago. I really thought his campaign staff would be savvy enough to keep something of a lid on it though and not allow it to filter too far into the campaign's actual strategy. in this, I guess I gave them way too much credit.
the original post to which I was responding in the above passage was discussing whether obama could potentially have turned out to be another mcgovern. it was a flawed question for numerous reasons, many of which were discussed by other responders in the same thread. but what none of them predicted, and what certainly surprised me, were that the real echoes of mcgovern in this race would be from the mccain campaign: the infighting within the party, the campaign waiting until after the primary and then embracing the weakest, most discredited factions within the party and giving up any legitimate claim to being actual reformers with a real vision for reshaping things, and finally a vice presidential selection process that struck me as oddly reminiscent of the eagleton debacle.
it was almost a certainty that with the disasters of the last eight years, the republicans were going to lose in 2008. what astonishes me, and what I never would have predicted, is that they not only lost on policy - they also lost on procedure.
it remains to be seen how much chicanery takes place tomorrow. my personal prediction is that if there is any out and out fraud, it will take the form of pennsylvania mysteriously going to mccain by about 2%, despite yesterday's poling showing obama ahead by something like 8%. the bradley effect will be blamed. entirely computerized voting will really be to blame. chaos may well ensue.
but at this point, even that seems unlikely to turn the tide. with something like 238 EVs solid for obama, he only needs to take 1/3 of the remaining 112 that are leaning his way in order to pull it off. that guy over at fivethirtyeight.com, a sabermetrician and thus clearly no one to fuck with when it comes to statistics, is computing the odds of a mccain victory as somewhere in the .5 to 3% range. the obama campaign doesn't want to call it a done deal because that might have the effect of suppressing Democratic voter turnout and thereby ending up a self-denying prophesy. but for all intents and purposes, it's a done deal.
I for one am highly looking forward to being disappointed in obama. after 8 years of expecting the worst and having the expectations satisfied every single time, it'll be lovely to be able to set high expectations again. inevitably, they will be disappointed, because at the end of the day, obama is a centrist, status quo-friendly, establishment tool. would that he were the socialist he is accused of being, but just as FDR effectively ended any hope of socialist revolution in this country in the 30s, obama will probably end it tomorrow. a mccain presidency might very well have caused it. but the other and more likely result of a mccain/palin presidency is some sort of militant, right wing theocratic phallocracy and I for one don't feel like rolling the dice on that one.
so I'm mailing my obama ballot tonight, and chanting "hell no - status quo" all the way to the mailbox.
silent majority this, motherfuckers.
dude, the democrats could run a salad crouton again mccain and win in november.
unfortunately, they don't have a salad crouton in the primaries, but I still think mccain is about the weakest candidate the republicans have fielded since gerald ford. there are so many ways to attack him: the Crazed Warmonger, the Hypocrite, the Big Meanie, the Adulterer, the Corrupt Crook. and those are just the ones that seem fairly likely. there's still the Manchurian Candidate and the Miscegenating Racist if one really needs to fight dirty.
and the serious crazies on the Right (which, even by my probably unduly forgiving standards, is a pretty large percentage of the total) are pretty lukewarm about him. at least one of the right-wing racist wackjob mailing lists I'm on has been ranting merrily about which third-party candidate they should get behind on accounta McCain not being enough of a nutbar for them.
but beyond any of that, my feeling is that his main undoing is going to be the fact that he's losing his marbles. I think at this point his brain has about the wattage of Ronald Reagan's circa 1986. the kid gloves the press has been using on him haven't brought this to light, but once there's an actual candidate on the Dem side, the swing voters will start actually noticing when he talks (at about the same time that he suddenly has to do so more often) and then the senile cat will be trying to claw its way out of the bag but failing 'cuz it's, you know, senile.
Hillary could win.
Obama could win.
Kerry could win.
hell, I think even Kucinich would have had a decent chance if he could have gotten through the primaries.
personally, I'm still pulling for a crouton to emerge from a brokered convention.
--
a few things have happened since then that I wouldn't have necessarily expected. for example, I did not predict the extent to which mccain would happily jump in bed with the wacko wing of the republican party. if I'd done the math a little further, I probably would have arrived at that one though.
one that I'd have been less likely to predict was the extent to which the real conservatives in the party have renounced mccain in droves: george will, colin powell, christopher buckley, even charles krauthammer sorta. I feel that said renunciations happened in large part because of some of the loony shit he pulled in the course of the campaign, and in that sense I suppose it all derives from the "losing his marbles" theory that I advanced six months ago. I really thought his campaign staff would be savvy enough to keep something of a lid on it though and not allow it to filter too far into the campaign's actual strategy. in this, I guess I gave them way too much credit.
the original post to which I was responding in the above passage was discussing whether obama could potentially have turned out to be another mcgovern. it was a flawed question for numerous reasons, many of which were discussed by other responders in the same thread. but what none of them predicted, and what certainly surprised me, were that the real echoes of mcgovern in this race would be from the mccain campaign: the infighting within the party, the campaign waiting until after the primary and then embracing the weakest, most discredited factions within the party and giving up any legitimate claim to being actual reformers with a real vision for reshaping things, and finally a vice presidential selection process that struck me as oddly reminiscent of the eagleton debacle.
it was almost a certainty that with the disasters of the last eight years, the republicans were going to lose in 2008. what astonishes me, and what I never would have predicted, is that they not only lost on policy - they also lost on procedure.
it remains to be seen how much chicanery takes place tomorrow. my personal prediction is that if there is any out and out fraud, it will take the form of pennsylvania mysteriously going to mccain by about 2%, despite yesterday's poling showing obama ahead by something like 8%. the bradley effect will be blamed. entirely computerized voting will really be to blame. chaos may well ensue.
but at this point, even that seems unlikely to turn the tide. with something like 238 EVs solid for obama, he only needs to take 1/3 of the remaining 112 that are leaning his way in order to pull it off. that guy over at fivethirtyeight.com, a sabermetrician and thus clearly no one to fuck with when it comes to statistics, is computing the odds of a mccain victory as somewhere in the .5 to 3% range. the obama campaign doesn't want to call it a done deal because that might have the effect of suppressing Democratic voter turnout and thereby ending up a self-denying prophesy. but for all intents and purposes, it's a done deal.
I for one am highly looking forward to being disappointed in obama. after 8 years of expecting the worst and having the expectations satisfied every single time, it'll be lovely to be able to set high expectations again. inevitably, they will be disappointed, because at the end of the day, obama is a centrist, status quo-friendly, establishment tool. would that he were the socialist he is accused of being, but just as FDR effectively ended any hope of socialist revolution in this country in the 30s, obama will probably end it tomorrow. a mccain presidency might very well have caused it. but the other and more likely result of a mccain/palin presidency is some sort of militant, right wing theocratic phallocracy and I for one don't feel like rolling the dice on that one.
so I'm mailing my obama ballot tonight, and chanting "hell no - status quo" all the way to the mailbox.
silent majority this, motherfuckers.
