Note the date...the following week, one term President George W.H. Bush defeated Michael Dukakis in a stonking great landslide, 426 Electoral College votes to 111...no-one has won bigger since...
Comrades,
Years ago, on my first
reading of Hunter S Thompson's Fear and Loathing on the
Campaign Trail (1973), I was astonished to discover that
according to any number of Masters of the Dark Arts on both
sides of the political divide, fully 20% of voters will vote on
the basis of which of the banners and placards outside the
polling stations they like the best on the day - that is their one
and only criteria. Nothing else matters. Hard to believe,
especially in a voluntary participation system - but true.
That's why candidates take extraordinary steps and spend astronomical eye-watering sums on
advertising to make sure their name is fully recognised at the
polls. Name recognition is king. No one knows what the surge in
mail-in ballots means for this, but it's still a huge chunk of
The Vote; a bloc that any self respecting politician would walk
over dead bodies for. So, in that sense, there are next to no informed
"swinging voters" in America. It's all black & white,
especially at the minute, with very little grey to work with.
Everything now, and it
has been for months, rests on GOTV (Get Out The Vote). 128.83M
votes were cast back in '16, but the pundits are saying, that
with 70M ballots already cast in person or by mail, total
turnout in this election could be pushing 150M votes or about
65% of registered voters - which would be the highest turn out
since 1908. With the Grand Old Party's long and proud history of
voter suppression and intimidation, about 20 million extra votes
in play can only mean one thing for the Trumpovuvuzela....very
bad news, very very crook indeed. The medico's are worried. It
could be terminal. Folks have been glibly talking about a "blue
wave" and even a "blue tsunami", but the way it is with the
opinion polls (and they have made it their very particular
business to considerably tweak and improve on the methods
employed back in the 2016 debacle), Uncle Joe could be pushing
close to 400 votes in the Electoral College, leaving The
Dotard-in-Chief with a few more than 100. In the event of that
happening, it'd be a no-brainer fait accompli result
no-one could argue with, ever. He promised to drain the swamp
and blow up Washington, but in that scenario DJ Trump! would be
hoist by his own petard. By almost any measure, the multitude
of pathways to re-election for the
current lunatic in the Oval Office becomes narrower and
narrower by the day, but don't whatever you do count out the
Orange Man from Twitter before all the numbers are in.
The Miracle of Democracy is just that - a miracle - very
strange, mystical, and totally unpredictable, unknowable things
can, and do, happen.
DJ Trump!'s most
outstanding achievement on the campaign trail has been his
uncanny ability to convert the very considerable advantage of
incumbency into a dead-set liability. In the present state of
things with a pandemic on, the Democrats have clearly gone down
the "give him enough rope" avenue, and told their ageing
candidate to stay home, shut up, keep under the radar, do old
man things, talk to a TV camera in the basement if you must, but
never engage the Trumpotus until absolutely necessary, etc et
al. That's while The Don stages rally after rally after
Nuremberg-style rally and becomes the biggest and greatest
unhinged and incoherent President of the United States that the
world has ever seen The more he preens his extraordinary
narcissism and shouts himself hoarse for the rusted on, the more
the slipknot in the noose tightens. The non-stop rallying is of
course preaching to the choir and even his own people admit it's
an entirely useless campaign strategy - it doesn't GOTV - it's
more about the President's tremendous and really beautiful
vanity and just jiving that thing he likes above all - lapping
up the adoration - otherwise he might get in a funk and go off
and play his 284th round of golf while in office. (Fun fact:
That's cost the US taxpayer a very tidy $142M in security and
transport expense alone.) He'll also find his henchmen further
contaminating the Supreme Court at the last minute will
back-fire on him, as droves of Republicans won't bother to vote
now, because they're happy and relieved that "job's right, job's
done". His coterie of
enabler's weak failure to come up with any sort of meaningful
COVID economic stimulus package surely is political suicide in
itself. Never mind the slaughter or the pain and suffering of
millions, the hard right-wing always seems to forget that the
newly impoverished class have still got the vote. And of course
the main showman himself neatly falls into another HS Thompson
bon mot "when the going gets weird, the weird turn pro".
I've heard it said that The Donald "sounds like he is running for the President of Talk Back Radio", but perhaps more to the point is "Trump and his family are not running for office, they're running from the law".
The Trumpotus is likely
to face what I've heard described as "a turducken of misery"
around Thanksgiving time. He certainly will not be left alone
after he exits Washington DC in the depths of mid-winter. There
are any number of people out there who want to to go him, and go
him they will, and he knows it. It's only by a quirky legal
convention that a President is immune from prosecution while in
office except by Congress (that's right! he's been impeached in
the House before being acquitted after a sham trial in the
Senate. I remember now!). And there's even talk in legal circles
of the DJ! pre-preemptively pardoning himself during the
lame duck period and then trying to use that as a defence in any
prosecution. Good luck with that one, son. Run it up the flagpole
and see how it flies. Look! I'm innocent because I said so!
As it stands, it's highly unlikely The Donald will ever return to New York on his way to the balmier climes at Mar-a-Lago, Fl., as the NY prosecutors have a list of charges as long as yr arm that could see the freak flying up the creek to some upstate NY jailhouse if he ever set up shop in Trump Tower, again. He's already $400M in debt, so you can imagine it'll be running down his leg when the legal bills come in. But you can't imagine retirement in Florida will be all that comfortable either, as I've always reckoned from the moment I heard about her, it'll be Stormy Daniels who has the last laugh in all of this, as the Feds go him under the Campaign Finance Laws as they were back in '16, in which case he'd do a nice stretch in a Federal Penitentiary for the hardened. You just can't pay off a whore with hush money and put it down in the campaign book-keeping accounts as "extra cabbages". Most unfortunately for the big beautiful boss of buffoonery - who has almost three months of becoming a very sore loser ahead of him - he has no place to run, no place to hide. And you'd imagine his no-talent family, boot-lickin' cronies and brown-nosed toadies would be shitting themselves Scomo-at-Engadine-Macca's-style, because they'd be acutely aware that once they lose power, the game's up, they become slow moving targets and they stand to lose goddam everything they've ever had.
Lil' Donnie's niece Mary L Trump (the daughter of Fred Trump Jnr; a hopeless wino who died of cirrhosis of the liver at 42, when she was just 16) perhaps put it best when she said "Don's just a terrified little boy, and has been his whole life". And you can't even apply the good ol' Aussie pub test here of "who would you rather have a beer with" as both The Donald and Uncle Joe are teetotallers. They both had/have alcoholic brothers, and Hunter Biden has been known to like a drink in a crisis, and is still going in and out through the revolving door down at rehab. Just imagine what The States would be like with DJ Trump! on the drink. Oh my Lord Joisus. But as my dear departed father was fond of saying "never trust a cold water man!".
I'll never forget
stumbling out of a cinema the night the result was telegraphed
through in '16 and going into a dimly lit bar across the road
not knowing that Donald J.Trump had won, but there on the
specials blackboard above the bar in a neatly written font of
white chalk was "The Edge... there is no
honest way to explain it because the only people who really
know where it is are the ones who have gone over"
- HST. My heart sank and I hardly needed to ask.
So, loose the bears on the midgets, and let the gaming begin!
