The polls this weekend say that Barak Obama holds a healthy lead over John McCain, both in popular and electoral votes. Articles talk about cheerful Democrats and glum Republicans. Pundits already are analyzing where McCain went wrong (hello: P-A-L-I-N).
And yet I don't dare to hope that the eight years of darkness will pass.
Come Wednesday, John McCain could be our next president. He probably is not as bad as Bush, but, then, that says little, as Bush surely must be the worst US president ever. But if McCain wins, hopes have so been stoked these past several months that I'm genuinely concerned that half of America will lose that golden ability to trust.
There would be distrust in the electoral process itself. A video is circulating on the internet showing a computerized voting machine in Indiana changing a Democratic vote to a Republican vote. Conveniently, the code for computerized voting machines is proprietary, and a friend of mine versed in these matters says that one could bury the code to change votes without detection in any event. If this sort of obscurity now trammels our electoral process, the energy Obama has instilled to participate in the process will be for naught.
Then there would be distrust of each other. There's much talk lately of the "Bradley effect," the idea that voters who say they will vote for Obama in the end would not vote for a black man. Enough of that talk now has gone around that people will believe it to be true should the actual vote not reflect what polls have shown for a few weeks now. That means that people will not trust what their neighbors and colleagues say about race. We would face a setback of many decades of dimension.
And there would distrust of the future. This would have two aspects. First, Sarah Palin actually could become president. I hope that even those who think well of her could acknowledge in their hearts that she lacks qualification to serve. Sure, perhaps she will be there some time in the future, but not soon enough to serve as president within four years.
But, more fundamentally, there would be distrust in the very essence of the presidency. Barak Obama in these past weeks has hewed to the image of a leader, of a president who would wield presidential power, not presidential symbols. John McCain has resorted to Joe the Plumber, a real person who happened to catch the attention of Rovian political advisors when he spoke to Obama on camera. Joe the Plumber now is everywhere. I even saw him last night, appropriately enough, as a Halloween costume. McCain has lost touch with what leadership means. We could not trust him ever to be presidential.
God, how I hope this post will seem quaint in just a few days.
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