Monday, November 5, 2012
by Burt Prelutsky
I’m seated hereat my computer on Thursday, November 1, 2012, five days before the most important presidential election of my lifetime and very likely, the nation’s.
According to most polls, it’s a dead heat. Frankly, I don’t believe the polls. I believe that in spite of crooked voting machines, dead voters and third party candidates who will draw anti-Obama votes away from Mitt Romney, Romney will win.
To some people, that will sound like wishful thinking. I won’t deny I have a rooting interest. But I have believed all along that Romney would win the election once people who had been bombarded with Obama propaganda saw and heard the man unfiltered through the media. That happened during the first debate. What some Democratic partisans fail to acknowledge is that Obama didn’t lose his advantage because he appeared to be in a coma, but because millions of voters got to see how much better off they and the ship of state would be with Romney at the helm.
Some folks have been turned off Gov. Chris Christie in the wake of Hurricane Sandy. The sight of that very large dog wagging his very large tail so ecstatically at the mere sight of Obama has them grateful that he didn’t respond to Ann Coulter’s beseeching him to go for the GOP nomination.
Frankly, I never understood why Christie had so much support in conservative circles. It was nice to see him face down the school teacher on that video that went viral, but in most ways and on most issues, he is a rather typical northeastern politician. And whereas it matters whether people have an (R) after their name in the House and Senate, where such things determine which party controls the agenda and committee chairmanships, it matters far less when it comes to governors.
In Christie’s defense, it figures that he would now sit up and beg Obama for a pat on the head. After all, New Jersey requires a ton of federal dollars for the massive clean-up the state faces. On the other hand, one would have hoped that Christie didn’t feel compelled to slobber quite so much while licking Obama’s hand. It got so bad, I kept wondering if Michelle was going to send Barack one of two four word telegrams: “It’s him or me” or “Rent a room, guys.”
If nothing else, the soaring gas prices should do in Obama. It’s not that the president, whoever he is, generally has much control over such things. But this time is the exception. That’s because Obama has waged continuous war against the oil industry. He not only cut oil leases on federal land, placed a moratorium on off-shore drilling and nixed the Keystone pipeline, but sent two billion dollars to help finance Brazil’s oil industry, simply because his puppet master George Soros is heavily invested in it.
If only Obama held such strong feelings against Muslim jihadists that he has when it comes to our oil and coal industry, America would be a lot better off.
There are several reasons I am betting that Romney wins the election. For one thing, Obama did not win in a cakewalk back in 2008, when so many people fell for his line of bull. In the intervening four years, they saw that Hope and Change translated into record-setting unemployment; a war on the middle class; power grabs involving health care and the automotive industry; a racist attorney general; capitulation to private and public sector unions; the fomenting of politically-motivated divisions between blacks and whites, women and men, young and old; the rich and poor; and an agenda that begins and ends with increasing job-killing environmental regulations, the number of federal bureaucrats and taxes.
On top of everything else, Obama has saddled us with a vice-president -- the fellow we’re always reminded when we have a Republican in the White House who is a mere heartbeat away from the presidency -- who gives every sign of either being a confirmed boozehound or suffering from the onset of Alzheimer’s. How else to explain that, even aside from his spooky teeth-baring performance during the debate with Paul Ryan and his promising blacks that Romney’s election would have them back in chains, he has recently referred to Senate candidate Tim Cain as Tom Cain, yakked about a 500 trillion dollar saving for rich people under Romney’s tax plan, twice misidentified the state in which he was speaking and just recently hailed an editorial in the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which he referred to as “one of the major papers in this state” while campaigning in Florida.
It’s one thing for Biden to remind us all of the tipsy uncle who shows up for Thanksgiving and falls asleep with his head in the mashed potatoes, and quite another to be reminded that he could wind up as the president and commander-in-chief.
Obama, whose political ambition led to the murder of our ambassador to Libya and three other gallant Americans, promises us that there is an ongoing investigation of the Benghazi massacre. He promises us full disclosure the week after the election. But anyone who is pinning his hopes on that promise probably also believed him when he said he would let us know who leaked all those national security secrets to the New York Times last summer.
The main reason I believe that Romney will win in spite of everything the Democrats can do to turn America into a banana republic is because, even with all the cheating we can expect to take place, Romney will simply get more votes honestly than Obama gets the Chicago way. My reasoning is that Obama didn’t exactly bury McCain, who ran a lousy, under-funded, campaign that culminated in a financial crash that was brought about by the Democrats but blamed on George Bush. Under those optimum conditions, Obama still only garnered 53% of the vote.
Does anyone seriously expect him to do as well among Hispanics, Catholics, single women, college students and guilt-ridden white voters, this Tuesday? Heck, thanks to the unemployment rates among minorities, and Obama’s coming out in favor of same-sex marriages, he won’t manage to get as many black votes as he did last time.
Even among my fellow Jews, thanks to his limp-wristed policy towards Iran and his obvious contempt for Bibi Netanyahu, he stands to lose 5-10% of the Jewish vote.
My faithful Arizona correspondent, Don Melquist, shared a piece of election trivia I found fascinating. Over the past 152 years, only six presidential elections have taken place on November 6th. In 1860, Abe Lincoln defeated Stephen A. Douglas; in 1888, Benjamin Harrison defeated the incumbent, Grover Cleveland; in 1900, William McKinley defeated William Jennings Bryan; in 1928, Herbert Hoover defeated Al Smith; in 1956, Dwight Eisenhower defeated Adlai Stevenson; and in 1984, Ronald Reagan creamed Walter Mondale.
In other words, six elections have taken place on that date and in each case, the Republican won; three times by overwhelming margins.
My advice to Obama is that he get cracking on his memoirs, and I’d suggest that Michelle find out if that job at the University of Chicago Hospital is still open.
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To read another article by Burt Prelutsky, click here.
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