I have lived through Presidential elections since 1968, when I was 3. Each of the years a GOP liar would win, I could just feel it in my bones. The dem that year, whether it be McGovern, Dukakis, or Gore, just wasn't properly dealing with the constant barrage of GOP smears, lies and attacks.
I have this distant, but growing feeling of dread for Obama this year because I just feel the GOP is going to do a rush attack on him just like they did to the others who have simply never gone on the offensive and gone on to lose.
All they need to do is get within a few points, so their caging operations, voter suppression games, voter registration tricks, and trick machines can do their dirty work for a third time in a row.
We can't let it get that close!
Any time that the GOP can make a lying attack that can be told in a slogan, but takes two paragraphs to refute, that's another time we are in trouble. A good example, is a horrible, but very slick website I've come across, NoHussein.org that literally accuses Obama of killing babies. They have a video of a baby being abandoned on an autopsy table by indifferent abortion nurses who leave the baby in the room, turning off the light.
The thing that gets me about that attack is none of Gore, Dukakas or McGovern and perhaps not Obama either, would have the intestinal fortitude to respond in kind. The Clintons would have though. I could see an ad already pointing out:
McCain HAS KILLED babies, when he dropped bombs in Vietnam. Many innocent women and children died in countless bombing runs that he has flown. so if any candidate is a baby killer in this election, its McCain.
Obama would never say that. so what will happen? that baby killing attack, which relates to how Obama would support a woman's right to choose, will remain, to convince a certain group of low information voters who don't know any better.
Then there's the "attack their strongest asset" Rove technique that worked so well against Kerry in 2004.
Ironically, the video against Obama starts with a slogan, "i invented the Internet." what infuriates me the most about that lie of a joke, is that Al Gore never even SAID that. He said to Wolf Blitzer that day in a CNN interview that, "I was instrumental in the creation of the Internet," which is extremely true, since it was Al Gore who wrote the high performance computing act of 1987 that basically funded and implemented the commercialization of the Internet, as well as plenty of the basic r&d that helped bring about the web as well. I doubt we'd have the Internet today if it were not for Al Gore. Al gore in 2000 was talking about how we need to upgrade to Internet II. bush of course, dropped the ball on that and Internet II is as Internet I was before Al Gore's law: a curiosity you can find in some university government and defense labs. Maybe later, if we get a democrat in the white house, we too, can have that far faster Internet. but like a typical liberal, I digress...
McCain's attacks against Obama as "too popular" and a "tax raiser" really are working. I hear a very faint voice in the distance noting how taxes, the way they were under Clinton, gave us the best economy ever, and the most prosperity, and most growth for all income groups... but its so feint, so distant, so weak, that nobody is going to listen.
As I have said before, if anybody bothers to do the math, they will find that one GOP borrowed dollar costs us $4.85 in interest. but that's not the only cost to borrowing so much money. By having treasury bond auctions all the time, the USA is sapping potential investment dollars away from whoever has money to invest, and instead of investing in something risky but rewarding, such as green technology innovations, or new computer technologies, they just sink that money into the black hole of treasury bonds. it is a major drain on the entire world economy.
so when McCain and the GOP says tax = bad, and when they say "not making bush's tax scheme permanent would be a disaster," that's just the same empty old words they used in 1993 to attack Clinton's balanced tax plan that gave us a future full of surpluses as far as the eye could see, and the real hope of paying down the GOP debt once and for all. It's very easy to see the results of not having taxes. just look to Equatorial Guinea, Chad, Burma, or any other country with abject poverty, starvation, dirt roads, and criminal rule.
But I've seen Obama's responses to McCain's attacks... and to be honest they are just answering within the GOP framing of the matter. Obama does not make the real comparison between a little tax now, and no expense later, vs. a little less tax now, and huge interest bills as far into the future as you can imagine.
What was different in 1992? For one thing, everybody in the Clinton campaign stayed on message. and for another thing, and this was the big one, they were unstoppable. A GOP smear, like the Jenifer flowers thing, would come along and Clinton would boldly go out campaigning and boldly do TV appearances, and proudly show his face in public as if there was no attack in the first place. that really worked.
It just seems to me, with the exception of the upcoming acceptance speech that is planned, that Obama somehow has responded to McCain's corker-like attacks with baptist church music playing to mesmerized crowds of kool-aid drinking Obama fans by shying away from the church style rhetoric, and from huge rallies that McCain and the GOP can only DREAM of being able to have. I think he should have those rallies and have them bigger and drown out that pitiful, jealous GOP/Rove attempt to turn such an asset into something bad.
I think that our TV generation of low info voters would understand the issues if they were properly framed. I worry that Obama is not doing it.
What do you think? how do you think Obama, or some 527 should respond to this nohussein website?