[sally]

ok, so i dont know what to think of this. my uncle sent it to me and was like, whoa.

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Obama next?

By Kurt Jacobsen & Sayeed Hasan Khan


ONLY deluded Clinton loyalists now believe that the Democratic presidential candidate will be anyone but the surprising senator from Illinois Barack Obama.

Even more deluded, one might imagine, are American news pundits who assert that Republican candidate Senator John McCain, whose policies are nothing more than shabby photocopies of Bush's disastrous agenda, has a fighting chance in November.

Yet Republicans are supposed to be a force to reckon with in the next election despite launching an illegal aggressive war, despite a horde of their high officials deserving to face criminal charges for gross misconduct, despite shovelling public funds freely into the coffers of corporate and financial cronies.

Predicaments abound. Take healthcare alone. While tens of millions simply cannot afford skyrocketing medical insurance or drug costs, at least half the citizenry, inadequately insured, is in for a shock when they do try to get private companies to pay up. The firms snip off 30 per cent for themselves before they dish out the first dollar's worth of care to anxious and overcharged customers.

Polls consistently show two-thirds or more of Americans want a national healthcare system, want to get out of Iraq, want the rich to pay their fair pre-Bush share of taxes.

The classic problem for the richest strata in all democracies frankly is how to persuade people who aren't rich to vote for them. Owning the mainstream media is a big help, as is owning most of everything else, including many legislators. Americans are indeed alert now to the scandalous lobbying power of moneyed interests but can do little so far to curb it through campaign reforms.

The policies that serve the rich are really not calculated to help anyone else, no matter how often they plead otherwise, so it would seem to be a hard sell anyway. Hence, the Republicans resort to invoking the flag, religion, the military, traditions (at least those that don't interfere with amassing money), law and order (but not for CEOs) and low taxes.

A few principled conservatives do care about quaint things like civil rights and keeping government in check, but they are a tiny muffled minority in Bush's party, whose buccaneering behaviour would horrify Edmund Burke or any other conservative democratic theorist of note. Yet savvy people in the media say McCain, who vows to carry on Bush's misdeeds, has a chance. The shame is that he does. And here's why.

The November election will produce a landslide victory for the Democrats in both Houses as well as the presidency, if all votes are counted. That's the catch. Stellar reporter Greg Palast, among other investigators, already has shown that the Democrats will start out the next election at least 4,500,000 votes down due to a variety of Republican disenfranchising gimmicks, ranging from illegal disqualifications of minority voters (who vote overwhelmingly for Democrats) to legal measures such as voter ID schemes under consideration in 19 states. This latter scheme is designed to cure the non-existent problem of voter fraud — instances are few and far between — but really to keep the Democratic vote down.

Schemes to discourage Democrat votes range from intimidation at polling places, to phony felon lists, to allocating too few machines in Democratic districts. If you are black in the US the chances of having your vote discounted is nine times higher than for a white voter. The odds are five times higher for a Hispanic vote being invalidated as for a white, and 20 times higher for a Native American (which enabled Bush to win crucial New Mexico in the 2004 election).

Don't get us started on the horror of privatised control of vote-counting via electronic machines, manufactured by a few fanatically committed Republican firms. The Democrats have made slow progress since 2004 in the absolutely vital task to make these crazy machines verifiable, or, better yet, dump them altogether. So the upcoming election will be closer than it needs to be.

If one looks philosophically at what ill winds blow, there is no doubt that it took two terms of blithering callous upper-class Bush to enable so talented and intriguing (and unknown) a figure as Obama to come to the fore — a black man, even something of an intellectual. Obama, over the next few months, needs to offer a restoration of the old 'New Deal', and he is indeed beginning, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1932, to get the message across to hard-pressed American families that he is on their side. But the ardent sense of entitlement to power that militant conservatives feel has to be seen on their blogs and heard on their radio stations to be believed.

The race card matters, though not as much as it used to, and will be played. The election ahead is going to be extraordinarily dirty. The media wants a race to sell advertising and will endlessly talk up McCain. For all the overblown liberal credentials of the average reporter, it is their bosses —who are not conspicuously liberal — who decide what goes in the news and what angle is permissible. Yet most white working class voters won't give a darn even if they believed silly rumours that Obama is Muslim (despite his highly publicised problems with Reverend Wright), not when they have endured having their pockets picked for the last decade by professed Christian fundamentalists.