Should be ours to lose

The only real question in this election is whether or not the Democratic Party will get out its famous "circular firing squad" and snatch defeat from the jaws of victory.  I hope that will not be the case, because this election is definitely ours to lose.

Whatever your feelings about Obama, it is a fact that he  ran a better campaign than Mrs. Clinton, who was very badly served by her top advisors.  He took everything she could throw at him, and beat her anyway.  And while sexism may have played a role in her defeat, I don't think a whole lot of it came from Obama the candidate.  From the media, certainly, but I can't think of anything Obama said that rivalled some of Mrs. Clinton's remarks.  Just my opinion; feel free to disagree.

The hard truth is that the Democrats are on the right side of virtually every issue, foreign and domestic, in this election.  McCain proves he is unsuitable to be President virtually every time he discusses an issue.  His confusion on Iraq, the Sunni, the Shi'a, and Iran is really alarming.  In walking the tightrope to keep Bush's base, he must promise to continue the Iraq War, on which his judgment has been appalling since virtually the beginning, when he opined that the war would be over quickly and we would be greeted as liberators. 

How will he pay for the war?  He has only two choices - to continue borrowing, and thereby bankrupting us, or to raise taxes, which is anathema to the Republicans who conveniently forget that Ronald Reagan raised taxes himself.  Where will he get the troops?  Will he continue the back-door draft of stop-loss and repeated deployments which is destroying our armed forces, or will he institute a draft, which is anathema to the Republicans, many of whom have proven themselves to be chickenhawks of the first order?

Bush's domestic policies have clearly been a shambles, starting with his tax-cuts for corporations and the rich, which have greatly increased the deficit and national debt.  Yet McCain, to appease Bush's base, must promise to continue them, which a non-partisan study has recently said would add $600 billion to the deficit.  While Obama's tax cuts as he states them are not perfect, they mostly affect the middle class, and coupled with the higher taxes he proposes for the wealthy and for corporations will add $700 billion to the tax base.

McCain does break with Bush on a few issues, such as global warming, but I don't think that will resonate.  As for his reputation as a "maverick", I think that has gone by the boards as he has reversed himself on a number of issues and will certainly be branded a "flip-flopper" by the Dems, if not also by his own party.

I don't expect Democrats to be single-issue voters.  We do not put on our jackboots and march in lockstep like the Republicans.  But there is one big picture that deserves to be looked at, and I ask anyone who reads this post to consider it carefully.  Starting with Nixon, every Republican president has launched an assault on the Constitution of the United States.  Nixon had Watergate; Ford kept the country from discovering the extent of Nixon's guilt by pardoning him (technically NOT unconstitutional, but still wrong); Reagan had Iran/Contra, with his shameful trading of arms to a terrorist nation for hostages; Bush I was up to his neck in Iran/Contra, and pardoned six members of his administration, most notably Caspar Weinberger, who might have directly implicated him in the crime; now Dubya, who has made a mockery of the Constitution by metaphorically wiping his ass with it over and over again.  The only thing that put the brakes on Dubya was the Supreme Court, and only by one vote.

The next president will certainly be appointing justices to the court, probably more than one.  If I were Obama, my first appointment to that court would be Hillary Clinton; my second, if he wanted it, would be to Al Gore.  My attorney general would be John Edwards.  My Secretary of Defense would be Wesley Clark; my Secretary of State, pending a second opening on the Supreme Court, would be Al Gore.

I ask all Democrats to consider that in the six years the Republican Party held the White House and both Houses of Congress, they proved themselves to be arrogant (remember "freedom fries" and the suspension of procedural rules whenever they felt like it, and the blanket assertion of executive privelege), incompetent (the still-botched federal response to Hurricane Katrina is a good example), and corrupt (just how many of these people have been indicted?).  If they are not held accountable by being thoroughly trounced in this election, then God help this country.

Yes, Obama is an unknown quantity.  But he has done a number of very good things in his primary campaign, from getting young people involved to raising large quantities of non-corporate money.  McCain is not an unknown quantity.  He is another super-rich, adulterous, greedy and dishonest (Keating Five, anyone), Republican, who promises to continue running this country into a financial, military, and moral ditch.