blogger interrupted

Watching the giddy pretzel logic of Ohio Republican bloggers lately has finally convinced me to go public with my predictions for the next 7 weeks of the campaign.  When The Stupid thinks it’s The Smart, it’s incumbent upon the rest of us to remind The Stupid they are, in fact, stupid. 

If Hillary Clinton had won the primary, this campaign would have been about her, and her gender.  If Barack Obama won the primary, the election would be about him, and his race.  That has been my assumption for over a year now.  It remains true today.  By defeating Hillary, Barack defeated a cynical politics of the past in its Democratic Party form.  He now faces the cynical politics of Republicanism, in all its venom.

It would always be thus for any black man running for president.

This election is not about the economy, or John McCain, or the war, or George Bush.  It is about whether Barack Obama will be given the incredibly heavy mantle of the first black president of the United States of America.  

That is not to say the issues of this election don’t matter, far from it.  The issues this year are so enormous, it would take something transcendent in the American mind to trump them.  The issue of race in America trumps them all, at every level, since the day the first slave was dragged upon these shores in chains.

The last American presidential election to be decided on race was 1860, after which our country nearly bled itself to death.  An issue with this kind of power, for good and evil, if put onto a national ballot in the form of a presidential election, will overwhelm everything else in the minds of the voters.  Whether subconscious, or in full understanding, each voter this year is taking a side in America’s 400 year war with its own soul.

Barack Obama, to overcome this, and get enough Americans to stand on the right side of that 400 year war, has to clear a bar set higher for him than any man, or woman, would ever reasonably have to face.  Because he is black.  The hand-wringing over Barack trailing the generic Democratic preference in polling is whistling past the graveyard, literally, of tens of thousands who went before him.  Posit this election to Thomas Jefferson, or Ben Franklin, or Abraham Lincoln, or John Kennedy, or Ronald Reagan, or Martin Luther King Jr., and they would certainly tell you without pause that the 2008 election would be about race.

On to my prediction.

Palin bounce?  Watch it come down.  Fast.  The recent Palin bounce is a direct result of The Stupid being given yet another reason to justify voting against a black man.  It’s also the inevitable last gasp of The Stupid, before the Rest of Us realize that The Stupid is a pack of lies.  Palin bounced too high, too fast, based on too little, for the bounce to last.  Palin and McCain have created a campaign that is nothing more than the brute force of constant lying, a facade of deceit, by their own hand, which cannot withstand the next 50 days.  It is all they now stand upon, and when it comes down, as it surely will, the “celebrity” meme will thus apply to them – what goes up fast, must come down faster.  Celebrities know this.  So does team McCain.

All Barack Obama needs to do now is prove his steady hand, his reason, his judgment, and his readiness.  The debates will decide this for voters.  If Barack Obama stands next to John McCain and compares favorably, the undecided voters, and some McCain voters, will make their decision to stand on the right side of that 400 year war.  

And you’ll be able to feel it.  It will be like the earth moving beneath your feet.  When American voters make this kind of central decision to their country’s being, it is a glorious thing to behold.  

McCain’s campaign knows this, which is why they now act like desperate liars seeking the one big lie they can make stick long enough to make Barack Obama unacceptable.  It’s frustrating.  It scares us all a bit.  It makes Democrats worry if yet again, we will have 4 years of Republicanism stain our country.  

But don’t worry.  America, in its most historic sense, is making its decision slowly here.  Give her time.  Sometime in October, probably the last two weeks, Americans of the highest patriotic order will decide that we will take that giant 400-year leap with this man, for whom the coming burden must loom like none of us could ever imagine, not even him.  

Obama in a landslide.  Both electoral votes, and popular vote.  You heard it here first.  And oh yeah….he wins Ohio, too.