Norman Solomon: Needed for This Election: A Great Rejection

[babylonsister]

Needed for This Election: A Great Rejection
by Norman Solomon | October 27, 2008



It could be a start -- a clear national rejection of the extreme right-wing brew that has saturated the executive branch for nearly eight years.

What's emerging for Election Day is a common front against the dumbed-down demagoguery that's now epitomized and led by John McCain and Sarah Palin.

A large margin of victory over the McCain-Palin ticket, repudiating what it stands for, is needed -- and absolutely insufficient. It's a start along a long uphill climb to get this country onto a course that approximates sanity.

McCain's only real hope is to achieve the election equivalent of drawing an inside straight -- capturing the electoral votes of some key swing states by slim margins. His small window of possible victory is near closing. Progressives should help to slam it shut.

Like it or not, the scale of a national rejection of McCain-Palin and Bush would be measured -- in terms of state power and perceived political momentum -- along a continuum that ranges from squeaker to landslide. It's in the interests of progressives for the scale to be closer to landslide than squeaker.

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http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/18239

[Joe Chi Minh]

1. I don't like articles like that, because, however well-intentioned, they

could have the same effect as the Republcian noise-machine, whether it's successful or not.

Furthermore, I don't undertsand how anyone who has seen the crowds coming out to see Obama, even from half a mile away, not to speak of the panoply of endorsements, nationwide, of ersthwile staunchly-red newspaper editors and notables of one kind or another, then considers the tiny crowds turning out to see a rather elderly torch-bearer for Bush and the Neocons, could possibly envisage the possibility of anthing but a resounding victory for Obama.

And on the basis of what? A CNN/Time Missouri poll, and bizarre New York Times claims that the gap between Obama and McCain is small. Apart from the complete absence of any redeeming Conservative feature of the McCain/Palin ticket, still less, progressive in a time of recession, and the significance of the disparity between the public turn-outs to hear the candidates on the stump, and the panoply of endorsements referred to above, the New York Times is virtually the house magazine of the Republican Establishment, now its Neocon rump, as Noam Chomsky illustrates rather well.

If they did manage to even significantly affect the Democrats' victory with their electoral villainy, I think there would be a lot of very angry Republicans, as well as Democrats.