E-Minus 13 Days

More hokey-pokey....

POPULAR VOTE PROJECTION: Obama 50.0%, McCain 47.3% (Obama +0.1%)

ELECTORAL COLLEGE PROJECTION: Obama 353, McCain 185

“McCAIN MAXIMUM” (Total Electoral Votes including states in which he is within five points - Colorado, Florida, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio): 261

The Rasmussen daily tracking poll zags back to 51-45 Obama.

Today let us embark upon a different thought experiment.  You know, those "voyages of the imagination" that the late Carl Sagan made famous a generation ago in his Cosmos series where he was in a field somewhere, picked up a dandelion and blew the spores everywhere, and the camera focused in on one of them until it was huge, and then somehow Sagan was inside it and it was hurtling across the galaxy like a starship in slipstream drive.  Only I'm putting the metaphor to a use that the evolutionist missionary doubtless would not have approved (which is one of the reasons I'm doing it): let us imagine that the polls are all wrong, or the Bradley Effect does still exist, or the "bitter clingers" and other Americans who would prefer not to die in a renewed al Qaeda North American offensive or the lingering death following an Iranian EMP attack come to their senses in the nick of time, and John McCain somehow comes from behind to shock the world, and - well, how do you render the Left any more enraged than it has been for the past eight years? - becomes the forty-fourth President of the United States.  What would happen after that?

First, any McCain victory will be a photo finish.  The only way he can win by my analysis is to "draw an inside straight" as it were (Colorado, North Carolina, Nevada, Ohio, and Virginia - so where is he focusing disproportionate time and resources?  Pennsylvania!  Where he's down by double-digits!  Reminds me of how Bush43 almost lost the 2000 election by spending the last week of that campaign in California....) and snag 274 Electoral Votes.  It is unlikely that he'll be able to win the popular vote, so he'll be under the same "He didn't REALLY win!" stigma that Dubya was in his first term, with the added hostility of the Dems being in a permanent, blithering "RACISM!!!!!" rage as they were about the Florida Insurrection eight years ago.

Which means, of course, that the EM will declare that Sailor has "no mandate" for anything except what is his M.O.: bipartisanship.  Reaching out to and working with Democrats.  Crossing the aisle, putting on the other team's uniform, and singing their fight song.  Governing EXACTLY as President Hussein would have.  And it's difficult to see him having much of a problem with that.  To the contrary, it's difficult to see him not enjoying that immensely, because it would be the chance of a lifetime for a center-left "maverick" who lives to stick it to his own party.

C'mon, folks, you know how "blue" the 111th Congress will be, as well as how much domestic policy overlap there is between the Donks and Darth Queeg.  "Climate change" environmental extremism, First Amendment evisceration (Think McCain wouldn't sign Fairness Doctrine legislation?), national suicide by civil liberties extremism and of course, "comprehensive" immigration "reform" (i.e. border erasure).  There's plenty of "the nation's business" that President McCain and his "good, close, personal friends" in the majority could, and would, get done, and all of it indescribably bad for the country.

If Maverick wants to have any accomplishments (and EVERY president does), he'll have no choice.  He'll never get tax cuts or energy exploration or constitutionalist judges through the next Congress, even if he believed in any of those things.  And as for his "I'll veto every earmark and make their corrupt authors famous!" vow, even if he spent the ensuing four years as a veto machine, the Dems will have such huge majorities (at least in the next two years) that the chances are better than even that they could simply override most of them.  And that wouldn't be very "comitous" or "bipartisan," now would it?

But wait, it gets worse.  Leaving aside President McCain's congenital anti-partisan perfidy, as a matter of law, a huge tax increase is GUARANTEED to go into effect during the next presidential term, no matter which candidate wins.  Why?  Because the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 are sunsetted.  They're not permanent.  If you'll recall, that was a provision the Dems insisted upon at the time, and to which Bush and the GOP majority foolishly acceded.  Now you can see why it was so foolish.  The Pelosi/Reid Politburo, unlike its Foley/Mitchell predecessor in 1993, does not have to enact tax-raising legislation.  They don't have to DO anything for tax rates to return to the levels of the Clinton detour; it is preventing a tax hike that would require pro-activity on Congress's part.

Given the current state of the economy and the direction in which it is headed, and how that direction would be accelerated by any tax increase, and how the party that holds the White House tends to get the credit for economic prosperity and the blame for economic reverses, why in the ever-lovin' world would Crazy Nancy and Dirty Harry want to put their party's fingerprints on a depressionary tax hike that would quite likely send the GOP the way of the Whigs, or John Major's British Conservatives, in 2012?

This is why I've basically sat out this campaign, opposing both Obama AND McCain.  It's as I said way back last February: when Sailor emerged as the last 'Pubbie standing, all conservatives were officially disenfranchised.  There were going to be two Democrats on the November presidential ballot, with one of them happening to have an "R" after his name.  A Marxist Democrat and a Lieberman Democrat, but two Democrats nonetheless.

I've never been one to buy into the "We'll win by losing" argument, but this looked like the exception to the rule.  It certainly worked out with Jimmy Carter, whose economically disastrous term brought us the Reagan Revolution; ditto the leftist excesses of Bill Clinton's first two years, which produced the Gingrich Revolution and a dozen year GOP run on Capitol Hill.  Indeed, if you look at the last half-century, beginning in 1960 there has been a repeating sixteen-year cycle of Americans taking foolish chances on unqualified, incompetent, dangerously inexperienced and naive Democrats (JFK, Carter, Clinton) who blunder into catastrophic national security crises (Bay of Pigs/Berlin Wall/Cuban Missile Crisis, Iranian hostage crisis/Soviet invasion of Afghanistan/near defeat in the Cold War, the rise of al Qaeda/9-11) and leave huge messes for their GOP successors to clean up.  Sixteen years is just about a generation, and it seems that each generation has to learn for itself why the Democrats are not fit to rule the country.

So now it would be Barack Obama's turn, he and the Donks would FUBAR America worse that Kennedy, Carter, and Clinton put together, and Sarah Palin or Bobby Jindal would lead another resounding Republican comeback that would send the party of Marx and Alinsky and Moore and Kos and Soros back into the red romper room for another dozen years until the cycle came 'round again in 2024.

Maybe.  Or maybe this is an era-change, like 1860, 1932, and 1968.  Maybe the Democrat Financial Logic Bomb has discredited the GOP for generations to come, and transformed America into a center-left country that will embrace Barry O's Chicago-brand "communitariansm" no matter what it does to the economy and our civic and social institutions.  Maybe President Hussein will succeed where Jimmy Carter failed in convincing Us, The People, that America's best days are behind us, and we've got to make do with less, accept permanent high unemployment, privations, contracted civil liberties (just not for illegal aliens and/or terrorists), and shortages.  That "fairness" is more virtuous and relevant a civic trait than "growth," and any return to Republican rule will just bring back the "greed" and "selfishness" that caused the "Panic of 2008" and "destroyed" the economy in the first place.

In other words, is it 1976 or 1932?  If McCain pulls off the impossible upset, it may not matter.  A third consecutive GOP White House term would keep blame for the recession squarely on Republican shoulders (and don't forget that taxes are going up regardless), drive the party's 2010 midterm congressional numbers to depths not seen since the 1964 Goldwater disaster, and so poison the well for 2012 that it's doubtful McCain would even seek re-election.  And whoever would run in his place - Vice President Palin or even an outsider like the aforementioned Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal - would face a landslide defeat (at You Know Who's hands) that would finally demolish the "50/50" alignment and consign the country to one-party Democrat rule for decades to come.

It's a case of picking your poison: Risk permanent partisan, economic, and national security disaster for the chance at a near-term, nation-saving political comeback in two and four years, or try to hold on, stave off disaster for a few more years, and guarantee it after 2012?

Welcome to the fence on which I have been disconsolately sitting for the past eight months.

But I fear the time has come to either mug or wump.  And I believe, ironically enough, it was Joe Biden who made up my mind, reinforced by Beldar and condensed in all its skin-crawling, hair-raising horror by Ensign Ed:

Obama, IBD points out, likes to use John F Kennedy in his speeches by quoting his inaugural address: “We should never negotiate out of fear, but we should never fear to negotiate.”  Kennedy put that idea into play by demanding a summit with Nikita Khrushchev five months later, less than sixty days after Kennedy botched the Bay of Pigs.  Kennedy utterly failed in the Vienna Summit and brough the US closer to nuclear war than anytime before or since.

And Kennedy dealt with a rational enemy in 1961.  What kind of signals would Barack Obama send the apocalyptic Iranian mullahcracy in his drive to hold a summit with no preconditions with Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?  Would they also see him as a weakling and start a war with Israel as a result?

And no sooner did Ed post that this morning than this story came off the wires this afternoon:

Senior Tehran officials are recommending a preemptive strike against Israel to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear reactors, a senior Islamic Republic official told foreign diplomats two weeks ago in London.

I don't like John McCain.  Heck, like Dirty Harry, I can't stand John McCain.  To connect the arrow for him I would have to have my nose surgically removed altogether.  His election would be the swansong of my party, and eventually my country.

But at least my family and I would stand a measurable chance of living through the next four years, however miserable that life becomes.  Given that JFK nearly got us nuked, Carter nearly got us conquered AND lost Iran, and Clinton bequethed us 9/11 and three thousand dead American civilians, I just can't bring myself to stand idle and take a chance on what judgment a False Messiah will bring crashing down on the nation.

Or, to slightly modify Kyle Reece's line from The Terminator, "Vote for McCain if you want to live."

It does redefine the term "backhanded endorsement," but at least it's better than Bill & Opus's 1988 campaign slogan: "A desperate choice for desperate times."