Don’t Forget to Breathe

The final pre-election polls show Obama in the lead. I would have said “comfortably” in the lead, but you know us lefties. We always expect a cartoon anvil to drop out of the sky and flatten us.

The Right is still running a signature right-wing campaign. They’ve got the illegal immigrant aunt, more 1960s terrorist ties, claims that Obama will destroy entire industries/ban Christianity/start another holocaust. A vote for Obama is a choice to go to hell.

Good thing the election is tomorrow, or in a few more days they’d be claiming Obama wants to eat your baby. With fava beans and a nice chianti.

Michael Tomasky theorizes
why the smears aren’t working the way they used to:

That coalition of affinity that Reagan created between right and middle, Bush has put asunder. His failures have made the average, apolitical American as distrustful of conservatism as he or she once was of liberalism – indeed somewhat more so, since the memory of conservative failure is fresher in the mind. This is a new context. Many experts have yet to grasp it. Certain elements within the mainstream media haven’t quite got it yet. And clearly some liberals just can’t believe that it might be the case.

This is not to say that negative campaigning will disappear as of tomorrow. But it is to observe that political contexts change, and eras end. I’m still suspicious enough to use the conditional tense, but by Wednesday morning even the most paranoid liberals may be forced to accept that fact.

I believe we are looking at an enormous political re-aliagnment, bigger than 1980. More like 1933. But these things don’t begin and end neatly. The re-alignment has been going on for a while — at least since Katrina — and I don’t expect it to end tomorrow. I’ll have more thoughts on that later.