The fact that the election was so close in terms of the popular vote (3% above 50% for Obama and 4% below for McCain) means there has not really been a significant shift in the views of most Americans. The fact that the map remains more red than blue illustrates that the tragedy can't compare to the opposite dominance of Reagan in his reelection, when he won virtually every state in the union. The fact that the Democrats failed to put together a filibuster-proof super-majority may also give some solace to those who saw through the lies and misrepresentations of the Democrats
What the election vote REALLY shows is that the American people have not necessarily shifted to the left, considering that the vote reflected
1) the economic crisis,
2) the Iraq War,
3) the fact that McCain was outspent by so much;
4) the fact that McCain did not even mention most of the most powerful arguments in his favor (which are summarized in this author’s article that can be Googled under “What the Republicans SHOULD Be Saying,” and the
Canada Free Press, Oct. 5, 2008); and
5) the fact that the vote was based on so many fundamental misrepresentations by Obama.
Media coverups and Palin put-downs
The many cover-ups of Obama's misrepresentations and unfair put-downs of Palin by the press will inevitably be exposed in full daylight. One doesn’t need the Freedom of Information Act on the federal level, or Freedom of Information Laws on the local level, to ascertain or evaluate the lies that were covered up by the mainstream press. So on what basis can seekers of the truth be optimistic that the press will change after Obama comes to power? Even Obama claims to have advocated change, and a change in the agenda of the press will inevitably bite Obama to the core. The press gave Obama a “free pass” because its agenda was to help him get into office at any cost, and at the expense of the truth and the American people. But now that Obama has been elected, the free press will consider itself free to expose the outright lies and misrepresentations on which his phenomenally effective and unprecedented campaign was based. Historically, the press normally seeks out scandals, and one wonders whether one of the reasons for the press’ former agenda to support Obama was that members of the press knew in their hearts that Obama would provide fodder for exposes of scandal for years to come. Just as the press had originally supported McCain and the Clintons, and then turned on them, history is likely to repeat itself in the case of Obama. McCain had been cleared of guilt in the case of the Keating Five, but the scandals in Obama’s closets have failed to be mined or disclosed in the mainstream press.
The mainstream press managed to con the American people into thinking that the campaign of McCain was guilty of focusing on negativity, whereas if anything the opposite is true, and backed by far more money whose sources are far more questionable.
The biggest question of all is how the press let Obama get away with violating his commitment to accept governmental finite funds in lieu of infinite fund raising, thereby double-crossing McCain into a corner, the same McCain who had fought long and hard for this reform to level the playing field.
Readers of the mainstream press missed the point about Ayers
The terrorist past of William Ayers should have been and will be shown to have been the least of the objections of Obama’s associations with him. What should concern most Americans more is that Obama ridiculed the devastatingly true allegations about his associations with Ayers
as an activist adult and lied, at first, in falsely indicating that his only association with Ayers was as a neighbor after being 8 years old when the terrorist acts were committed – and never repudiated. In fact, Obama and Ayers shared leadership positions and radical ideas together as adults, in ways that have been documented elsewhere (Stanley Kurtz, Wall Street Journal, Sept. 23, 2008) but not yet brought to the attention of the mainstream public. The cover-up won’t be allowed to persist.
The real "first black president."
Imprecise Republicans claimed that Obama's political campaign was launched in Ayers' living room, giving the Clintonian Obama an opening through which to point out that the official launching of his political career took place elsewhere, without denying that one of his early "meet and greet" fund raisers was indeed held in the Ayers’ living room. Clinton may have indeed claimed the figurative title of "the first Black president," but Obama has earned the ironic title of the second Clintonian president. So in terms of governing style, an argument can be made that, in a second irony, nothing has in fact changed!
Readers of the mainstream press missed the point about Wright
The cover-up of the Wright connection is significant not so much for the fact that Obama sat in Wright’s church for so long; many people don’t pay attention to their pastors’ sermons, whether pasteurized or not, and should not be held accountable for what their pastors say, although exceptions might be made for pastors as anti-American and as hateful as Wright.. What most people do not realize is the extent of the closeness between the pastor and the politician. As Nixon discovered upon threat of impeachment, lying about what happened can sometimes be more damaging than simply admitting what happened. Then, in Obama’s case, denying that he knew what his pastor was saying for 20 years calls into question his ability to react promptly to simple intellectual stimuli. How can we trust a person to put his finger on the nuclear trigger if he is so slow as to take 20 years to notice what his pastor stood for, and who could not make up his mind but voted “aye” over 100 times as a legislator.
The comparisons to Palin
The comparisons to Palin will inevitably be exposed, as well. Obama was made out by the press to be the smooth talking intellectual, while Palin was impaled unfairly by Saturday Night Live and other mainstream sources. Actually, although Obama proved he could memorize the same campaign speech over and over again and read from teleprompters very fluently, he routinely hesitated and paused repeatedly and most dysfluently through interviews. Only after Palin’s high-pressured inaugural speech at the Republican convention did people find out that the teleprompter was not synchronized because of the huge applause she received, so she had to improvise on her own. I recall noting at the time that she glanced at her notes rather than at the teleprompter, demonstrating amazing presence during the most intense pressure imaginable. Similarly, although shortly after she entered the national spotlight, she was criticized for her response about the “Bush Doctrine,” post interview pundits argued about at least 4 different definitions for it, and concluded that even Bush himself never used the term. Palin, incidentally, was as smooth and cool as a cucumber during her interviews.
Negative Campaigning
In terms of negative campaigning, the mean-spirited Obama campaign repeatedly focused on McCain’s age and torture-induced disabilities (incurred while he was defending Obama’s right to say whatever he feels like saying), rather than his time-tested values, and McCain proved through and including Election Day that he remains more energetic than many if not most people half his age; Obama blamed the current economic crisis on “eight years of Bush’s failed policies,” whereas the Republicans’ actual failure was their failure to point out that the stock market was going up for most of the first six years of the Bush presidency, but the economy came close to collapse only after the Democrats captured control of Congress for the last two years. The Republicans generally failed to drive home the fact that the underlying cause for the economic collapse was the formation by Democrats of Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac, and the pressure by Democrats and entities like Obama’s ACORN to force banks to make loans to people who could not be expected to be able to pay them back in the event of an inevitable downturn in the economy. The Republicans failed to drive home the fact that Obama had fueled the fire, and that McCain had tried to put it out.
Iraq
On Iraq, Obama and his cohorts blamed McCain for the Bush Administration’s failure to win the peace in Iraq promptly after America won both wars. What the Republicans failed to drive home was that experts in the intelligence community that had been appointed by Democrats as well as leaders throughout the world believed that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, so that at worse Bush erred as did everyone else, but did not consciously lie, any more than did the African-American hero Colin Powell who made the case on behalf of the Bush Administration. Even had there been no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq at the end of the Second Gulf War (which remains a matter o f contention), it is now clear that Saddam’s plan was to rebuild his arsenal of WMD after the weapons inspectors would leave, and if he was capable of invading Kuwait with limited WMD, he was surely capable of invading the dominant powers of the Middle East upon rebuilding his arsenal to a more potent degree than previously. Had Obama’s plea for the immediate withdrawal of America from Iraq been adhered to, America would have lost the war in disgrace, emboldening future tyrants like Hussein; the surge that McCain advocated has enabled the United States to essentially complete the job and win the war so that the Americans can gradually continue to return to their country with honor, and Hussein-like tyrants will have to consider American reactions to acts that endanger the future of the free world, if not while Barack is in power, at least after he will be defeated the next time around.
The Youth Vote
The youth vote will quickly become disillusioned when they discover the first time the impossibility of Obama's being able to keep many if not most of his campaign promises, especially during the present recession. Even if he will be able to technically keep income taxes down for the middle class, at first, he will inevitably raise all kinds of other taxes; rich Americans will find loopholes, will pass off taxes in higher prices for goods and services, and/or will take their assets and their businesses out of the country if taxed too highly, resulting in a smaller base of rich taxpayers and working middle class American citizens. So the young people who voted for Obama are sure to be disillusioned long before Congress will come up for re-election.
If Obama will really give African-Americans preferential treatment, as many of them have been led to expect, the middle class will presumably come to its senses, and if Obama won't give African-Americans preferential treatment, then many if not most of the African-Americans who voted for him will accuse him of representing Uncle Tom rather than Uncle Sam.
The bottom line: There is every reason to expect that the lines Obama has given to the American people will be exposed as rapidly as his rise from obscurity, and that the lines at the polls the next time around will reflect the disillusionment that should begin on Inauguration Day. (If, however, Obama will leave his rhetoric behind and actually change himself into a centrist, and not the country into a sickly socialist entity, I will be happy to cast this article into oblivion, but in that case he will probably lose his base and perhaps be sent into oblivion himself!)
An American hero has fallen like a ripe old acorn in part because of a tainted ACORN and its many trainers (including Obama) and trainees. How can anyone find comfort in the wake of such a tragedy? The truths of their values and agendas have been disclosed but not widely and effectively enough to reach enough of the American electorate. In a universe where cream inevitably rises to the top, and dirt inevitably sinks to the bottom, the time is sure to come when the truth about Obama will seep in to the consciousness of the majority of the American people, and the people who lied to the American people and who misled them will inevitably be thrown out of office.
