No doubt the positive Polls are a good indicator. However, if the plutocrats behind the Republican Party can't win one way, they will try to win another. Remember how Gore won the popular vote? The Bush campaign had a Supreme Court contingency plan laid out which they activated when it looked like they could lose Florida.
Have no doubt that the Right Wing Plutocrats have also devised several contingency plans to win regardless of what Romney or Ryan do or say. Or how many secret damning videos are produced. Or what the polls say. This election is too important to them to lose.
The upcoming elections can still be stolen through illegal manipulations of the actual voting process itself. There has hardly been enough attention and action paid to this problem. We must resist, what I have dubbed Premature Congratulatory Disorder (PCD) inspired by gaffes, smuggled videos, etc., and turn our attention from the POLLS to the huge problems inherent in the actual voting:
1) Voter Suppression and Machine Fraud
2) Election Intimidation planned by 'True The Vote'
3) Etc.
Paul Krugman was riffing on Paul Ryan and the alleged 'stench' remarks in the NYT this morning, Death by Powerpoint, Contd.
Intrade still gives Romney a 27 percent chance of winning, not far off Nate Silver’s estimate. But if this Politico piece is to be believed, Paul Ryan has already bailed out:
Though Ryan had already decided to distance himself from the floundering Romney campaign, he now feels totally uninhibited. Reportedly, he has been marching around his campaign bus, saying things like, “If Stench calls, take a message” and “Tell Stench I’m having finger sandwiches with Peggy Noonan and will text him later.”
Can I say that even though I’m not exactly a fan of Mitt Romney’s, this is just bad behavior? You’re supposed to wait until it’s actually over before you do this kind of thing.
This diary was inspired by a commenter to this Krugman article who summed up the pitfalls to our current predicament brilliantly and I felt deserved wider readership.
To quote Joseph O'Shaughnessy of Downers Grove, Illinois:
This is not the beginning of the end or even the end of the beginning to quote someone born on the 30th of November.
If you think that people in power will lay down because of a poll or polls, you don't know NFL owners or the American oligarchy.
We are the American people, the people who don't want to tell our neighbors how to live their sex or religious lives, who don't want to let people die on the street, who don't mock Native Americans, who don't hate Muslims or Jews, who don't want to turn the clock back to the 50s on racism.
We are the people who want to get back to work, build an economy with American workers and create a safe, secure and properous place to live for everyone.
We know this is not over by a long shot. .
(my bold)
Mr. O'Shaughnessy's laser like focus on the real problems facing us, is very instructive and we would do well to take his very sound words to heart. We need to focus more on all the elements of Election Day, rather than joining choir about favorable Polls or how the R candidates are making asses out of themselves.
That doesn't matter. As Grover Norquist famously said, all they want is a president with a working hand to sign legislation they will put in front of him. They could care less if he walked around naked and spoke to trees. Norqust has ominously said that they will tell him what to do.
Be warned. And take the current Right Wing at their word. So all the stuff that matters to us, does not matter a damn to them. (I do not dismiss Polls, but they are not going to matter a damn when the various forms of trickery are implemented on Election Day.)
And if there is one thing about which I am sure:
The Plutocrats will never give up. No matter what.
The only way to overcome them, is to be willing to endure and play smarter and longer than they.
Mr. O'Shaughnessy continues:
So don't read me polls. Don't tell me we're winning. The game starts when people start voting.
Hundreds of thousands of people in the key swing states have been disenfranchised. If they cannot register or do not vote...you'er looking at President Romney and Senator Akins, and Senator Brown instead of McCaskill and Warren. It will be tragic for the country
There is still at least $500 million dollars in Right Wing money to be spent to spread more propaganda. Fascism is not a campaign. It is a way of life.
Don't buy into the polls if you are concerned about Democracy.
Play the game to the end.. We should have learned that the refs can take it away from you at the last minute if they control the game....and in this case...they do.
(my bold)
We don't need as many celebratory diaries on the Rec List. Yes, let's continue reading about our standings in the Polls and whatever new outrage is revealed re. Romney, Ryan, Rand, Inc..
But we also need more diaries on the Rec List about the actual status of the problems of voting: machines, how we are going to handle the massive Voter Intimidation planned by "True the Vote," what the current issues are with regards to voter id laws, who is going to transport voters to the polls since in some states Sunday voting has been shut down...... etc., etc.
This is the conversation we need to be having.
And I thank Joseph O'Shaughnessy for his wake up call to all of us.
I am hopeful, but 'it aint over til its over.'