The campaign that almost was

So, here we are on Monday morning before Election Day. The fat lady (sorry, caloricly enhanced) is off in the wings warming up her voice. The polls are not looking good for us at all. The polls have been starting to look better each day, unfortunately, I just don't think that there is enough time. The latest audio from Obama indicates that he would kill thousands of jobs and put the cost of turning on the lights in our homes out of sight. Give it a listen...



He did this interview in January. Where has this audio been all this time? I was listening to the radio this morning and one of the callers said that if this would have come out a couple of weeks earlier, Obama could not have carried Ohio, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, Illinois, and other coal producing states. Last night, I was watching Hannity and Colmes, and they said the same thing.

This seems to be a theme about the McCain campaign for the last couple of weeks. The idea of "Why didn't we hear that a couple of weeks ago?" "Why hasn't the campaign been pounding this for the past couple of weeks?"

A couple of weeks ago, I was driving across Toledo and McCain was doing an interview with WSPD radio here in town. The host asked what he had to do to win and McCain went down a list of things that they needed to say and messages they needed to pound home. Throughout that list, I was pounding my steering wheel and screaming at my radio, "When you gonna start, JOHN?!!!!!"

We've gone back to "It's the economy, stupid," in this campaign. The facts are that the Democrats in Congress as well as Presidents Carter and Clinton and Barack Obama have their fingerprints all over the genesis of this economic crash. They were the ones who forced the subprime loans that started this thing. Presidents Carter and Clinton pushed it, Democrats in Congress including Pelosi, Dodd, and Frank forced it to be expanded in spite of protests from Republicans like John McCain. Even as late as July of this year, Barney Frank was saying that the system was fine and Fannie and Freddie were fine. Obama himself even brought a lawsuit against Citicorp to force Citibank to make more subprime loans. Yet, as late as last week I was at a speech by McCain and a speech by Palin and I heard nothing of this.

The Democratic run Congress has a 9 percent approval rating while Bush is holding an approval rating between 25 and 30. Yet you almost never heard the campaign putting Obama together with congressional leaders like the Democrats put McCain together with Bush.

A friend and I were talking late last week and I said that if a person set out to throw an election I don't think they could have done a better job than the McCain campaign did. Also from that conversation is a theory we have as to why you never really heard about the economy stuff. We're thinking that deep inside himself, McCain so dislikes Bush that he would rather leave Bush's legacy with the economic problems than put it where it goes, even if it means losing the election.

Here is my last plea to voters before the election...

Last night, I watched an economic analyst who said that neither candidate has a great economic policy at this point. Obama's policy, if not implemented just right, will cause a depression. McCain's policy, if not implemented just right, will cause runaway inflation. The potential problem comes in that there is a very real chance that Obama and the Democratic Congress will have nobody to slow them down. If McCain were to manage to pull off the miracle come from behind or the Republicans manage to stave off the Democratic supermajority in congress, we could probably keep this in check. Otherwise, there will be very little to slow down the oncoming depression.

I pray that tomorrow we manage to pull off something, be it stopping the Democratic supermajority, or putting a Republican in the White House, to keep the two party system alive, but I don't hold out much hope. Without one or the other, I see a very real dismantling of the things that made this country the greatest on earth.