Down to the Wire

I know, I know. You’re as tired of politics as I am. I tend to watch television with my DVR remote in hand, and I always speed through the political ads, even for candidates I like or admire. But I’ll beg your indulgence for two or three tidbits I ran across today that I found interesting.

First, there’s Real Clear Politics (RCP), a a Chicago-based political news aggregator, polling data aggregator, and blog founded in 2000. I’m not a big political blog reader, so I tend to skip RCP’s commentary (which tends to be more conservative) and focus on their polling data. They compile hundreds of polls on many issues, and do an admiral job of breaking it down for easy analysis. The pre-election polling averages they come up with have, in previous elections, compared favorably with post-election results.

So it’s especially heartening to see their electoral college projections. As of this writing, they have Obama with 238 solid electoral votes, with 73 more leaning toward him and 95 completely up in the air. A candidate needs only 270 votes to win. So even if all of the toss-up votes go toward McCain, and 56% of those currently leaning toward Obama end up voting for McCain, Obama will win.

Moreover, national, non-partisan polling data has Obama ahead an average of 6.6%. President Bush’s approval rating is down to 25%. Dems are ahead of Repubs in congressional polls by 8%; 74.7% of the country disapprove of the job Congress has been doing, and a whopping 84.6% think the country has been heading in the wrong direction.

Now, one of my friends (was it you, Adam?) pointed out a electoral phenomenon in which Black candidates generally do better in the polls than in the election booth; apparently many white voter don’t want to reveal themselves to be bigoted, even to a pollster, but in the anonymity of the voting booth, their true sentiments come to the fore.

My mother, on the other hand, who really doesn’t have a political bone in her body, thinks the results will be even higher in favor of Obama. She thinks white voters may be lying to pollsters, particularly in traditionally red states, because they don’t want to reveal that they’re as progressive as they truly are at heart.

By the way, Garry Trudeau has submitted next Wednesday’s “Doonesbury” strip to the syndicator. He has his characters rejoicing in Obama’s victory. As the Associated Press article puts it:

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) — It’s not exactly “DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN,” but some newspaper editors are pondering how to deal with a “Doonesbury” comic strip to be published the day after the election that assumes Barack Obama will win the presidency. Comic creator Garry Trudeau delivered a series of strips for next week’s papers showing his characters reacting to an Obama victory. But he offered no such option in the event of a comeback by John McCain, who’s trailing Obama in the polls. Trudeau’s syndicator is offering papers a series of rerun strips from August. But the Obama story line is forcing some editors to question whether “Doonesbury” could put them in a spot — albeit in the funny pages — similar to 1948, when the Chicago Daily Tribune infamously declared in huge, front-page type that Republican Thomas Dewey had beaten Democrat Harry Truman for the presidency. The strip shows three soldiers watching TV and reacting to this announcement: “And it’s official — Barack Obama has won . . . Making him the first African-American president in history!” “Hoo-Ah!” one of the soldiers says. “Son of a gun! What a great, great day! We did it!” another soldier says. “He’s half-white, you know,” says a white soldier. “You must be so proud,” responds a soldier, who isn’t white. The rest of the week’s strips allude to an Obama victory.

Finally, I’ve recently started reading a fascinating site called The Root. It’s an English-language online magazine of African American culture launched in January 2008; it’s owned by the Washington Post folks.

One of their columnists, Michael Dawson, has written a thought-provoking article called “Ugly to the End,” thinks that even if Obama wins, it may not be smooth sailing:

Half a century ago, Malcolm X warned that when “we” started winning by their rules, “they” would change the rules. The desperate and despicable tactics of the McCain-Palin campaign have vividly illustrated the lengths that the reactionaries who have dominated for most the last decade will go in order to maintain power. There is less than one week left, but here are some of the problems we should be monitoring. Many of these are not only a threat to Obama’s campaign, but much more importantly, a threat to a just participatory democracy and an anti-racist civil society. Even if Obama does win, which I fully expect, there is a real danger that long-lasting damage has been done to the American polity by some of the reactionary tactics of the GOP. The Racist Card: GOP local chapters have been inciting nothing short of racial hatred, and it is having a discernible effect across the country in energizing the racist dregs of the nation. Outside of Chicago, the local CBS News affiliate reported Friday night about a sign surrounded by barbed wire that has an illustration of Obama portrayed as Bozo the Clown surrounded by the common circle with a negative slash. The caption read, “No Brozos.” Photographs are circulating on the Internet showing a white male with a T-shirt reading “N**gers Please. It is called the White House.” The GOP itself has been complicit in evoking racist stereotypes. In California, a local volunteer group produced an image of Obama’s picture superimposed on a $10 food stamp—which itself is surrounded by pictures of ribs, watermelon and fried chicken. While the local party apparatus that produced the flyer unconvincingly claimed they did not realize that the images were offensive (the head of the volunteer group claimed “It was just food to me. It didn’t mean anything else”), a local black Republican activist called the flyer “awful.” In Virginia, a local GOP official wrote a flyer that ridiculed Obama’s potential appointments (and much of black America at the same time). He argued in part that Obama’s “platform” would include hiring Ludacris to “paint the white house black,” increase foreign aid “mostly to Africa” so that “the Obama family there can skim enough to allow them to free their goats and live the American Dream,” and that Obama’s drug policy consists of “raise taxes to pay for drugs for Obama’s inner-city political base.”

Wow. Just wow.

You will be voting on Tuesday, right?

Thursday Cuteness

My new great niece, Jillian, in costume with her mother and father, Jenny and Mike, at her first Halloween party. I thought Jillie might be dressed as Curious George, but he was found by a Man in a Yellow Hat, and I don’t see any yellow hats there.

Hate’s Last Stand

Since I seem to be devoid of new ideas, or too pressed with work and life to spend much time writing and working on the long-promised Big Trip entry, or still being in the shadow period of a particularly tumultuous Mercury Retrograde, or all three, I haven’t been able to post much that’s new and personal recently. And while I’m weary of political ads and analysis (a bad side effect of having voted early, I guess), I couldn’t help reposting this on-point piece from one of my favorite columnists.

It’s racism and homophobia, neck and neck, down to the wire. Can they hang on?

By Mark Morford, SF Gate Columnist | Wednesday, October 29, 2008

Let’s not get carried away.

Let’s not go so far as to suggest we’re about to enter into some sort of fluffy utopian tofu puppy happyland where nipples fly free and consciousness expands and the fetid rivers of racism and homophobia that course through the American heartland like acidic sewage somehow magically vanish, somehow become dramatically curtailed, should the twin forces of progress known as President Obama and a vanquished California Proposition 8 [or Florida Amendment 2] somehow come to pass.

Let’s not be naive. Just because it looks like the Western world is about to get its first black intellectual president, just because the nation’s most influential and populous state could very possibly decide, finally and forevermore, that two adults of the same gender can get married without the cruel hammer of religious ignorance crashing down upon their heads, well, this can’t possibly be a sign that racism and homophobia, two of our three most revered national pastimes (don’t forget the sexism!) are going away anytime soon.

Unless it can. Unless some of our darkest cultural demons could finally be up for a major exorcism. Could it be true? Could this vote, at the very least, be one hell of a giant step forward in the fight against two toxic beliefs that have poisoned the American mindset for ages? Let me suggest: You’re damn right it could.

Maybe you’re not convinced. Maybe you need a sign, some sort of indicator of what’s truly at stake, something that proves we are at a turning point not merely of tax brackets and energy strategy and foreign policy, but of the very tone and flavor of who we are and what we value as a nation. Yes? Easy enough.

Here it is: Just listen to the screaming.

Can you hear it? It is the Grand Rule of Bigotry, same as it ever was: Prejudice and fanaticism tend to yell loudest and cling on the hardest when they are most threatened, when know their worldview is slated for imminent demolition.

Just look. As I write these very words, big-money ultraconservatives are joining churches and temples and sad, sad priests nationwide in extolling their fearful throngs to send huge portions of their life savings straight to the gaggle of pro-Prop. 8 extortionists, in an attempt to ban gay marriage and crush what essentially amounts to a type of love they cannot, will not understand.

And because they cannot understand it, they fear it. And because they fear it, they do as paranoid, fear-based religions have done since the dawn of a man-made God: They try to kill it.

The screaming is downright deafening. Right now, the Prop. 8 fight is second only to the presidential race in sheer dollars raised. The good news is, the homophobes are being outspent by the non-terrified by about four to one, with major corporations like Apple and Google coming out very publicly against it. The bad news is, the religious right is panicking, rallying, pulling out all the stops to get Prop. 8 passed, no matter what.

But here’s the tragic part: They don’t really know why they’re panicking. They don’t really know what the threat is, exactly. Except for the loss of their own power. And control. And cultural relevance. Besides that, I mean.

But they do know one thing: If California goes all-in for marriage equality, it’s a slippery slope indeed until other states eventually follow suit, and before you know it the entire country will have to let love in and recognize scary gay people as valid Americans — you know, just like we did not so long ago for those awful black people.

Ah yes, the racism. Not so easily parsed, and not so easily answered by a simple legislative proposition, given how much more deeply it infects, how much more nefariously it’s woven into the very fabric of the nation.

Right now, even more than the homophobes, the racists are out in force. Nauseating indeed have been some of the e-mails readers have passed on to me in the past year or so, often the result of someone forwarding one of my pro-Obama columns to a conservative friend or relative they once deemed capable of idealogical flexibility — or, at the very least, respectful disagreement — only to receive back a note crammed like a shrapnel bomb with the very kind of venomous language you want to believe doesn’t exist anywhere except maybe our most hateful rural backwaters.

It’s a repulsive portrait of Obama indeed. References to Nazis, radical socialism, Muslim terrorists, a new black uprising, interracial marriage, gangsta rap, and of course lots and lots of the N-word, all wrapped in layers of hate and ignorance so rancid it’s like some sort of xenophobic fantasia where Rush Limbaugh interbreeds with Michael Savage in Ann Coulter’s personal vat of battery acid and pain.

But these are not merely the usual hot little spews of hate from the expected places, like the rural Midwest and the South and dumb-as-dirt skinheads from Tennessee. The race baiting has gone upmarket. From Sarah Palin’s carefully worded Caribou Barbie flirtations with white small-town America, to the attempts to link Obama directly to black ’60s militants and domestic terrorism (and don’t forget those “radical” black churches), if you have any doubt whatsoever that McCain’s Rove-trained team of jackals isn’t trying every trick in the how-to-bait-a-racist handbook, you haven’t been paying much attention.

So then, I am not here to suggest the impossible. I am not declaring that President Obama and a DOA Prop. 8 will somehow instantly put a cap on the fire hoses of discrimination and intolerance that regularly spit their bile across the land. This is not really the point.

The point is, one again, all about energy. About tonal shift. A deeply intelligent black American president changes the racism game forever, at a very deep level indeed. And a resounding defeat of intolerance in California sends perhaps the most powerful message yet to the conservative screamers across the land.

The message is this: You do not have to change your beliefs. You do not have to budge an inch on your views. You are still free to hate black people, still free to fear gay people (or demean women) all you like. It’s simply that we as an Obama-led, gender-inclusive nation no longer have any real use for your brand of poison. We are done with you.

And if that’s not a magnificent jolt of progress, I don’t know what is.