Usually, about now, the propaganda machine of the GOP is running full tilt, and voters are being buried in an avalanche of propaganda, one designed to reinforce the determination of supporters while raising doubts and sapping the will among Democrats.
I remember back about eight years ago, the Queen of the Weasels, noting the flood of GOP agitprop on the airwaves being dutifully repeated as news by a manipulated and compliant media, sighed, "I hate that they can do this and we don’t fire back at them."
Of course, that was 1996, and Clinton won anyway, since Bob Dole was busily running against Bob Dole. And the Democrats were fairly adept at their own agitprop, even without VRWC radio and easily suckered reporters. They managed to create the impression that Bob Dole’s running mate, or his father, was Newt Gingrich.
But in 2000, Democrats, who perhaps looked at the previous two elections and felt that the GOP propaganda machine wasn’t as effective as people thought, were a little too relaxed, with the result that Republicans stole the Presidency. They used inspired psyops to convince the general public that Putsch "won" Florida and that Gore was trying to steal it. The opposite, of course, was the case. Between VRWC talk radio, a compliant and easily manipulated press, lots of lawyers and some crooked judges, the GOP stole the election.
By this time, five days before the election, the propaganda machine should be running full tilt. Along with convincing the faithful that Putsch is a strong and resolute leader, it should have dispirited opposition with bold and confident declarations that [whoever the hell the Democratic nominee is] is weak, flip-flops, lies about his record, which is terrible, and looks French. In the meantime, the grass roots of the GOP: talk radio, trash churches and local campaigns, have unleashed a shitstorm of smear and innuendo designed specifically to keep voters from bothering to vote.
And of course, there’s dirty tricks, ranging from tearing up yard signs to flat out voter fraud. Both sides are guilty, of course, but the GOP has, in recent cycles, made a fine art of it.
They had their twin targets all lined up. They wanted to corral the dumbest 45% of voters, and the richest 10%. The two, counting overlaps, would make 51% of the vote. But the dummies were dismayed by the lack of jobs and the draft, and the richest 10% saw the free market fundamentalism of the GOP as pure economic bunk that was doing more harm than good.
In this strangest of elections, the well-lubricated machine of the VRWC seems to have derailed. Certainly, it is throwing all the vicious punches we all expected, but they seem to be landing without impact, when they land at all.
Locally, in a county that in recent years has gone 70-30 Republican, the Kerry yard signs far outnumber the Putsch ones. The local Democrats planned a victory party for the second at the local golf resort, an idea that seem audacious and maybe begging for trouble ("jinxing" the election, or Schrödinger’s Politics). Not only are ticket sales 250% of what was originally anticipated, but the smaller hall, which seemed cavernous five days ago, has been replaced with the larger hall. One television has been replaced by two big-screens, and one of them will be gleefully tuned to Faux News.
Democrats are confident this year. Far more so than just two weeks ago, in fact.
There’s a lot of reasons why that is so. Thanks to the internet, Air America, and folks like David Brock and George Soros, the right no longer has a hammerlock on the casual media. Air America is not only beating the pants off right-wing talk radio in the 37 markets in which they compete, but has millions more listeners on satellite radio and through streaming audio on the net. The left also has a much better organized and responsive organization, not only on the national level, but at the all-important grass roots level. Our local newspaper was filled this week with letters to the editor from fired up liberals, and nary a single right-wing voice was to be heard.
Then, too, there’s the fact that the economy is still in the tank, and even Putsch’s allies on Wall Street have come to realize that Putsch’s largess to multinational corporations at the expense of America’s national treasury is doing even them more harm than good. Markets usually drift downward in the weeks preceding an election, but a good rule of thumb is, if the Dow loses more than ½% in the month prior, the incumbent is in deep trouble. This time, the Dow has dropped four times that amount.
But the main reason is Iraq. Iraq was a grade-A, prime cut clusterfuck right from the get-go, and to the dismay of the Pubs, the general public has caught on to that. And the news just keeps getting worse and worse.
Just yesterday, the number of Americans killed in Iraq reached 1,111. An odometer number, it was one that would stick in the public mind. It was a lot bigger number than most people imagined back in the heady days of April, 2003, when people believed that jubilant liberated Iraqis were pulling down statues of Saddam.
On the same day, the prestigious British medical journal, The Lancet, reported on a household survey of Iraqis it commissioned which studied the population against the actuarial models and the changes seen since March of 2003 through this summer. It discovered that 100,000 more Iraqis had died in that time than the models would predict. That’s an awful lot of people dead for a war where it is obvious the administration didn’t actually have any valid reasons for starting it.
Then there was the matter of the missing explosives at al Qa Qaa. Bad enough that they were high explosives (HMX, RDX and PETN), ideal for terrorist use because they were easy to conceal, safe to handle, and provided immense bang for the buck. Worse was that every effort by the administration to control the damage and spin the story away blew up in their faces. They tried claiming the munitions were stolen before the invasion, and a television station embedded with soldiers was able to come up with footage of American soldiers inspecting the undamaged UN seals on the cache two weeks after the invasion. They tried saying that the 377 tons of high explosives was nothing compared to the millions of tons of munitions in Iraq, but people were able to figure out fairly readily that one pound of high explosive had at least as much destructive power as a tank – a one hundred ton "munition."
Next they tried claiming that the Democrats deliberately broke the story now to try to embarrass Putsch. That backfired when it came out that the story was broken, not by the Democrats or the American media, but by a letter to the International Atomic Energy Agency from Mohammad J. Abbas, an official of the Iraqi Ministry of Science and Technology, who declared that the missing explosives consisted of 215 tons of HMX, 156 tons of RDX and 6 tons of PETN. He went on to describe them as "the most lethal non-nuclear explosives used in making armaments." That they also are handy in the construction of nuclear bombs caught the press’ attention.
Perhaps the strangest effort at deflection came from the Washington Times, the vanity newspaper of the America-hating Sun Myung Moon. Moon’s organ made the claim that the Russians had stolen the high explosives and spirited them away to Syria. Moon, of course, would love to foster conflict between America and Russia for his own ends, but his readership of raving right wing loons don’t factor Moon’s open hatred of democracy into his pronouncements.
Unfortunately for the Moonie Times, the claim came out just as a frightened and outraged Russia, worried that some of the explosives would go to Chechen rebels or other Islamic factions in Russia, called for a return of UN inspectors because they no longer had confidence in the ability of "coalition" forces to keep the world safe in Iraq.
Various extremist factions in Iraq promptly lined up to claim they had the explosives and game the Americans. Al-Islam's Army Brigades was first, declaring "We promise God and the Iraqi people that we will use it against the occupation forces and those who cooperate with them in the event of these forces threatening any Iraqi city."
That struck directly at one of the main bases of Putsch’s reelection campaign: that he had made the world safer by invading Iraq.
It also gave Democrats the opportunity to note that Russia would be a poor candidate for deliberately embarrassing Putsch, since just days earlier, the icy and vicious KGB apparatchik, Vladimir Putin, had just taken the extraordinary step of urging Americans to vote for Putsch. Not only does Putin top the list of foreign leaders likely to become radioactive in American perceptions in the near future, but the GOP’s xenophobic base wouldn’t be amused with a Russian leader telling them who to vote for.
The other pillar of the Putsch campaign, that he was firm and resolute, is also backfiring. Firm and resolute are good qualities when things are going well, but while "staying the course" worked well for FDR in 1940, it didn’t work so well for Herbert Hoover in 1932.
When you are headed for a pine tree at 85 mph, "unswerving" is not considered a virtue.
Even baseball worked against Putsch this week. The Boston Red Sox, a team that, whatever the actual politics of the team owners and players, is seen as a blue-collar union Democratic type of team, won the world series. Not only did they knock off the team of the Plutocrats, the New York Yankees, but they symbolized good times for Massachusetts.
And people irresistibly associated the junior Senator from Massachusetts with the Red Sox, and that knocked over a third pillar of the GOP – that Kerry was a "Massachusetts liberal."
With five days to go, I predict there will be no big October surprise. Republicans are feeling so low right now that they’ll hardly be able to steal with both hands.