I am loving the Great Orange Satan's diary today on how "We are Winning." Good stuff. I had suspected all along the Olympics would be a good boost for the President (patriotism, good will, America at its best.) I figured at about this time on the calendar Obama would start to open up his lead, as voters begin to wake up and tune in.
But lately Rachel Maddow has put me on alert. She's been focusing on attempts at voter suppression in states like Michigan that I'd been previously unaware of.
Right now, it looks like if Mitt Romney is gonna win it, the GOP is gonna have to steal it.
What's the plan?
Voter suppression laws in half the states of the union. Ohio and Michigan cutting back early voting. Dirty tactics designed to discourage people from turning out. Poll watchers taking workshops on challenging the vote. It's all happening...on the GOP side of the ticket. They're deploying tactics designed to keep our voters at home and give their base its maximum advantage. We're not dealing with one national election - but fifty state elections. And, as we learned in Florida in 2000, just a handful of votes in a handful of counties could lead to President Romney.
I know from my own connections to the campaign that Obama and the state parties in the most hotly contested states are lawyered up. But I've got no sense of what their plan is - it sounds like they're playing this one totally by ear - taking challenges as they come. Any coodinated legal strategy is being kept inside the bowels of the campaign. But there has to be the fear that - this time out - we could lose, again, on a technicality.
I want to have here a conversation about what we think will happen if we wake up in November, again, with a 51% win for the Democrat and Mitt Romney is declared the winner. With all the attempts at voter fraud afoot in the country at this moment, will we stand for it again? How far will we go? What will be the solution?
And have you, as liberals, braced yourself for this possibility?