Turn The Page

Closing arguments in the 2008 Presidential election are being made this week. Most notable is Barack Obama's call for an end to the failed Republican policies of the past eight years (I'd say the past fourteen).

CHICAGO (Reuters) - Democrat Barack Obama on Monday called on voters to "turn the page" on the policies of the Bush administration as he emphasized his message of change in a closing argument for the presidential campaign.

With eight days left before Election Day, the Illinois senator laid blame for the deepening financial crisis on U.S. President George W. Bush and said Republican presidential candidate John McCain's approach on the economy would mirror Bush's.

"Sen. McCain has served this country honorably. And he can point to a few moments over the past eight years where he has broken from George Bush -- on torture, for example," Obama said in excerpts from a speech he is to deliver later in Canton, Ohio.

"He deserves credit for that. But when it comes to the economy -- when it comes to the central issue of this election -- the plain truth is that John McCain has stood with this president every step of the way," Obama said.

McCain does brag about voting with Bush 90% of the time and has flip-flopped on the Bush tax cuts, initially opposing them but now embracing them.

 

As this blog has taken great pains to point out in the past, "tax cuts" is the only tool left in the Republican toolbox and as the old saw (sorry) goes, "If all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail". I've made the argument that, indeed, taxes are too low right now.

 

There's a subtext to this speech that should not be lost on you, however. This is my closing argument.

Obama held steady with a 5-point lead over McCain among likely U.S. voters nationally in a Reuters/C-SPAN/Zogby national tracking poll released on Monday.

Exit polls on election day 2004 showed Senator John Kerry with a three point lead nationally over President George W. Bush. When the dust settled, those results were exactly flipped in the actual vote.

 

Since 1996, the incidents of vote discrepancies between actual vote tabulations and exit polls, and even predicting polls taken in the days immediately preceding an election, have exploded exponentially. In 2006, for example, exit polling suggested that Democrats should pick up 40-50 seats in the House of Representatives, while they were able to capture only 28 seats.

 

Polling data are accurate, they have been for decades now. Even the US Census in 2004 suggested that 125 million votes would be cast in the 2004 elections, and lo and behold, when the final tally was added up, 122 million votes were counted...with an additional 3 million votes either uncounted or challenged!

 

Polling data is supremely accurate in statistical analysis like this.

 

That's a warning shot, folks. Errors that favor one party over the other should be an alarm to anyone, regardless of whether you believe there has been deliberate vote fraud or not, and the discrepancies that have arisen over the past twelve years have skewed Republican by a 12 to 1 margin. That made even partisan Republicans sit up and take notice, including former Reagan Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts.

 

If, indeed, there has been a deliberate attempt to steal elections, something that can be inferred but not proven, based on the fact there is no way to audit the votes in many districts, then there is also no reason to believe that any vote, any district, any state, is safe.

 

"Turn the page," indeed. It would not be impossible for the vote-thieves to go to the well one more time in a grand way. After all, until someone is caught and the crime exposed, criminals continue to commit crimes and the more desperate and confident a criminal becomes, the grander his crimes become.

 

And if it is merely a systemic error, then it is a systemic error that has grown over time, not contracted, and we must be ever vigilant against its unchecked growth.

 

In other words, it's time to get behind Barack Obama and make sure that not only you vote, but that you get your friends and family to vote as well. We can't afford a close election, not this time, not with the forces of nature and man working against us.