Obama’s top campaign adviser David Axelrod on the coming 10 days before voting begins. (Italics mine):
The Obama campaign sees no major event that can now alter the trajectory of the election, the president’s top adviser told The Huffington Post in an interview Thursday. And with President Barack Obama holding slim but discernable leads in several critical battleground states, there is a continued sense of confidence that a second term is in the offing.
“In my view we have got the lead and the ball and now it is a matter of executing the final 10 days of the campaign,” David Axelrod said in a telephone interview.
“Governor Romney profited from that first debate primarily by recouping those voters who he had lost in his dismal month of September when they had such an uninspired convention and when the 47 percent tape came out,” Axelrod continued. “But that is all that happened. We’ve had two debates since. I haven’t seen — in the things that I have looked at — I haven’t seen momentum since that time. I think the race has settled in, and it has settled in with us with a small but durable and discernable lead in these battleground states both in the aggregate and individually. The question is how does he change that dynamic now? There is no big intervening event.”
He should have said “If there is no big intervening event.”
Because there is going to be one.
Hurricane Sandy.
Read on for more.
When watching the eternal farce that we laughingly call politics I often wonder whether the real deal is a sort of “Act of God” thing. We all run around willy-nilly, conservatives and liberals/RatPublicans and DemocRats throwing political bombs at one another as if any of it made a bit of difference. And then the universe throws a monkey wrench into everybody’s plans and what’s going to happen next simply happens. Afterwards the winners take the credit and the losers hole up to plot and plan for next time.
When you get right down to it, Bush II’s real failure was due to Hurricane Katrina’s path through New Orleans. 100 miles in any direction and the U.S. electorate would never have awakened to the utter incompetency of his regime. Fuck up in Iraq? Get caught in an unphotographable economic storm? Play S+M games with dogs and prisoners in Abu Ghraib? What the hell, we’ve still got out FatBurgers and SUVs, right? Where’s the problem? But when the shit hits the fan right next door and the designated cleanup crews don’t have enough manpower or Febreze to make the problem disappear quickly?
What the fuck!!!??? Who is this asshole!!!
What happens on Election Day is quite likely to be defined by how the President appears in response to this oncoming crisis.
David Axelrod, his fucking moustache and the rest of the 1% spinners who populate the DC politocracy don’t have a clue about what’s about to go down. What have they got to fear? The’re insured up the yin-yang and protected like the royalty that they really are not.
They sit in their office suites, their bedroom community McMansions and their on-the-road five star hotels and pontificate about how “there is no big intervening event” in the forseeable future. What do they know…or really care…about the millions of underfunded people who stand to lose everything if the Frankenstorm goes ballistic in their areas? They’re covered, and so are their clients.
Meanwhile…the universe enforces its own evolutionary needs any which way it must.
Hunker down, Dem folks. Your “campaign” in blowin’ in the wind right now. Bet on it. All’s it’s gonna take is one big gust to blow the election for or against Obama. And who’s really doing the blowing?
God’s trusty helper, Old Man Weather.
Bet on it.
Maybe you do need a weatherman to know which way the wind’s a’blowin’.
The political wind, anyway.
Hunker down, folks.
Hunker down and pray.
Booman writes in his article You Can’t Plan for Life:
For four years I have been anticipating an election that will take place in 10 days. I have been thinking about it and writing about it and strategizing about it and planning for it. But it looks like I will be spending the week before this election preparing for, enduring, and recovering from a storm without precedent.
How weird is that?
Not weird at all, Booman.
Not weird at all.
Mark Twain wrote “Everbyody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” He might also have written “”Everbody talks about politics, but the universe does do something about it.”
And in his wonderful poem “To A Mouse” Robert Burns wrote :
But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!
Word.
Guess and fear on, fellow humans.
Guess and fear on.
We are but little mousies in the face of the winds of the universe.
No thy-lanes us.
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
