3by9

Sorry, Wingers: Not This Time

The election is nearly over: tomorrow is do-or-die day, the culmination of nearly 2 years of campaigning. Promises have been made, new faces have been introduced, people have been scrutinized, and lies have been told. Most of these lies have been told by the Conservative right wing.

Republicans are very good at winning, there’s no doubt about that. As a Democrat who has spent the majority of his voting life with George W. Bush in office, I’m basically accustomed to losing. Democrats lost in 2000 and 2004 for various reasons, one of those being that our candidates simply lacked charisma, but another much larger reason is that Republicans will do anything to win. Anything. They will say anything and do anything to win. They’re very good at seeing what needs to be done to win an election, and doing it, regardless of the costs.

In 2000, during primary season, Bush’s campaign crew unleashed the most vile, unbelievable smear campaign against John McCain and destroyed his political chances that year. One smear was distributing a letter calling McCain “the fag candidate” to scare Christian voters away thinking that McCain was pro-gay and would hire homosexuals into cabinet posts.

Another far more dastardly smear is detailed in the following quote by Rick Davis, McCain’s current campaign manager. Here are his words from 2004 about the 2000 Presidential race:

It didn’t take much research to turn up a seemingly innocuous fact about the McCains: John and his wife, Cindy, have an adopted daughter named Bridget. Cindy found Bridget at Mother Theresa’s orphanage in Bangladesh, brought her to the United States for medical treatment, and the family ultimately adopted her. Bridget has dark skin.

Anonymous opponents used “push polling” to suggest that McCain’s Bangladeshi born daughter was his own, illegitimate black child. In push polling, a voter gets a call, ostensibly from a polling company, asking which candidate the voter supports. In this case, if the “pollster” determined that the person was a McCain supporter, he made statements designed to create doubt about the senator.

Thus, the “pollsters” asked McCain supporters if they would be more or less likely to vote for McCain if they knew he had fathered an illegitimate child who was black. In the conservative, race-conscious South, that’s not a minor charge. We had no idea who made the phone calls, who paid for them, or how many calls were made. Effective and anonymous: the perfect smear campaign.

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The smears that the Conservative right have used against Obama are numerous. He’s a Muslim. He’s a terrorist. He hates America. His supporters aren’t “real” Americans. His supporters hate America. He’s not one of us. He’s not an American citizen.

Through all the smears and the name-calling, Obama has kept his cool. When asked about the things that the McCain campaign is throwing at him, the names they call him, he laughed and said he’s been called worse things on the basketball court.

He just laughed it off.

The wingnuts threw everything they could at Obama, and he stood tall. He gained ground on subjects that were considered McCain’s strong points. He looked like the experienced one as McCain chose Palin to be his VP. He won all the debates, including the “town hall” debate where McCain was supposed to be at his finest. Obama stayed calm in the face of an economic collapse while McCain suspended his campaign and flailed around.

Obama is the one who looks Presidential.

Tomorrow, Obama will be Presidential.