Since late February, this year's presidential campaign has been Barack Obama’s to lose. With vast Main Street appeal and the ability to bilk average citizens out of millions of dollars, the idea that Obama might actually lose seems even more far fetched than the nightly, Pravda-like claims of Keith Olberman. Nonetheless, recent polls have shown that at the least this election will be a horse race until the end. Faced with a tough fight and Zeus forbid an Obama defeat, a strange series of excuses have begun to bubble to the surface as explanation. Fantastically, few assign any blame to Obama or his politics, opting instead, to imagine causes both overly broad and factually inaccurate. In short, the quest for excuses has thusly begun with MSM golden saints writing editorials and even ‘articles’ that try to excuse and justify a potential Obama defeat as a result of... latent racism, Main Street ignorance, or a McCain campaign which is supposedly now both immoral and dirty.
Foremost of these arguments is a completely brazen, totally improper use of racism and the race card. No better example of this can be seen than a recent Washington Post article in which Obama supporter Randall Kennedy said in regard to an Obama defeat: "I'll think that an important ingredient of their error is racial prejudice -- not the hateful, snarling, open bigotry that terrorized my parents in their youth, but rather a vague, sophisticated, low-key prejudice that is chameleonlike in its ability to adapt to new surroundings and to hide even from those firmly in its grip.”
Such fear-mongering and overly generalized claims are now appearing all over the American left. While divergent in style, the excuse that Obama could only lose due to racism is now a very real, prepositioned part of the 2008 dialogue. To his shame, Obama has from time to time played into this idea with statements to the effect that, racists would only vote for his opponents and his own primary loss might disenfranchise millions of Democrats.
Meanwhile closer polls have spawned a series of rather urgently styled contentions in regard to John McCain, 2008, and the public in general. In a strange mixture of causes, an Obama defeat is now being defined as the result of some kind of foul play by McCain or some kind of group denial on the part of the American public. In this, the American voter is being portrayed as some kind of mindless robot who can only choose according to a visceral response. To me nothing is more insulting to the American voter than to say he or she is motivated solely by wedge issues that he could not "actually" agree with or believe in.
As for the McCain campaign, Obama has been attempting to paint any potential defeat as one at the hands of a James Bond bad guy and not a legitimate political campaign. Obama and his staff are now calling the McCain Campaign the “sleaziest in modern history” and the reincarnation of Nixon-Agnew. Oddly, Obama is trying to take the high ground on an issue when he has no credit as for months his campaign has employed negative attacks, lies, and false quotations. Obama is now playing into that orthodox leftist victimhood that paints the GOP as minions of darkness and Liberals as the perfect and unblemished champions of truth. Oh and yes, the threat of mass liberal exodus to Canada in the event of a GOP victory is back on the table. We should be so lucky.
While the result of such actions is quite the same, the rationale for this pre-defeat debunking differs according to source. For the Obama sympathizers that stack the media, explaining in advance an Obama defeat is a clever escape from realities of a 21st-century America that they never understood and cannot readily command. Keen on personal glory and factual sophistry, many media commentators are now drunk on high-minded Obama rhetoric which has no room for voter choice. In collusion, and in the high coldhearted circles of the Daily Kos or Rosie, lording brains cannot comprehend a world in which voters have examined the candidates in an even-keeled manner and decided to disagree with Sen. Obama and his politics. Like Magtheridon himself, the Hard-Left seems incapable of understanding that America is neither a giant College or a European Principality.
As for the Obama camp itself, laying a groundwork for defeat is, in my opinion, a clever way of hedging bets and raising money. For his part Obama, who for months, has built up himself as a modern day Pharaoh cannot take on the slightest accountability of mistake, lest his superficiality become less bright and his role as a newly discovered Greek god become less pronounced.
Meanwhile, after a rockstar convention and the great discovery of Gov. Sarah Palin the outlook for the GOP ticket has dramatically changed. The party seems rejuvenated and a refreshed Sen. McCain is tearing up the stump with a patriotic, sensible and aggressive agenda of reform. In the moldy conclaves of Republicans and conservatives, months of anguish and reminiscently professorial recrimination has given way to excitement, hope, and whispers of a great leader finally finding his wings. Oh and yes, there are also those wonderful rumblings in many quarters, Democrat, Republican and independent alike that we can actually defeat the farce of Obama and elect the leadership of John McCain.