RE: [Marxism] The Republicans' hate week

[Joaquín <jbustelo@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Fred Feldman writes, "By the way, we shouldn't start writing off the
possibility of Kerry winning."

And especially not on the basis of Gallup and other pig press polls. 

We should remember that the biggest news organizations aren't just
generically bourgeois but specifically Republican. 

It isn't just Murdoch's Faux News. The head of Time Warner, which owns
the Corporate News Network, is Dick Parsons, a life-long Republican
operative. Jack Welsh's GE owns NBC and Telemundo, the #2 Spanish
network, and shares control of MSNBC with Bill Gates (also a Republican,
it should be noted for the record). ABC belongs to Disney, run by
Michael Eisner, the guy who tried to suppress Farenheit 911. Radio
monopoly Clear Channel --behind-the-scenes mover of the "support our
troops" rallies on the eve of the invasion of Iraq-- is somewhere to the
right of Attila the Hun. Jerry Perenchio, owner of Univision, is a heavy
contributor to Republican causes with close ties to the Mexican
Azcarraga family (Televisa) and Venezuela's Cisneros family
(Venevisión). He got from the Bush administration an ok to merge with
another company and now controls 70-80% of ad revenues in
Spanish-language media in the United States. 

IF you get THAT, then this will come as no surprise.

The 2000 pre-election polls showed a generalized, systemic
pro-Republican bias. None predicted a Gore victory by 1% (what the
actual outcome would have been with all votes counted). The 5 or 6
"major" polls had Bush leading, by ranges of 2-5%. Most egregious were
the CNN polls by Gallup. A three-day (Fri-Sat-Sun) poll of nearly 3,000
"likely voters," with a sampling error of only 2%, showed Bush with a 5%
lead right before the elections. Ironically, the *only* poll from a
Republican outfit that predicted a tie was the Murdoch Faux News Channel
poll. The one network in Democrat hands (CBS, controlled by Sumner
Redstone's Viacom -- think MTV) also called the race a tie.

The polls are no good, frankly, because they are based on the answer to
the wrong question. They are asking people who they plan to vote for,
and counting the answers of those who fit a model of who are the "likely
voters." 

But the outcome of U.S. elections is determined, not by who "the
electorate" votes for, but by who votes. 

The groups with the highest propensity to vote are heavily Republican;
the groups with the least propensity to vote are the opposite. A 55-60%
turnout would result in a Democrat landslide with the political center
of that party shifting over somewhere to around Howard Dean if not
Kucinich; a 75-80% turnout would pretty much wipe out the Republicans,
but it would also probably signify a major breakdown in bourgeois
political-ideological hegemony over the country.

Republican tactics are aimed at alienating and turning off voters,
driving them out of politics, turning them into non-voters. That is why
their convention was so nasty and the rest of their campaign will be
even nastier. 

Experience shows that attack ads work against Democrat candidates. They
do NOT convince ANYONE to vote for the Republican. Instead, their aim is
to demoralize and demobilize the potential Democrat base.

I suspect we'll also see a tremendous amount of Florida-style
shennanigans, which will, of course, go entirely unreported, as they did
in 2000. Just to give one example of what I mean, in Ben Hill county,
which is a "Black belt" county is the South of Georgia, fully 19% of the
presidential vote in 2000 was thrown out. It was mentioned, buried in an
article on the New Year's eve edition of the Atlanta
Journal-Constitution in an article wrapping up the "official" counts in
the elections by the Secretary of State. And nowhere else.

Think about that. One out of every five voters in a heavily Black county
were disenfranchised -- and everyone was OK with it. Nobody said "boo."
Not the Democrats, not the Republicans, not the NAACP, not the SCLC, not
the AFL-CIO. Nobody.

This year Republicans have to contend with a new factor, however, which
is the groundswell of deep-seated hatred for Bush. That is almost
certainly going to be underestimated in the public opinion polls,
because they will be based on counting only "likely voters" and I
suspect this sentiment is much broader than the strata of the population
that usually votes. In *this* context, the attack ads may backfire,
getting this layer even more pissed off at Bush and therefore more
motivated to vote.

The *one* tremendous asset the Republicans have going for them, and it
should not be underestimated, is John Kerry and the Democrat campaign.
Kerry's insistence on taking on the war as his own, wrapping himself in
the flag of militarism, is probably going to cost him more votes than
all the Republican attack ads would in a "normal" campaign. 

I very much see this at my job and in interactions with other "normal"
working people (not leftists or movement people). Most say they'll vote
ABB, and some are quite upset when I tell them I'm going to (illegally,
as it turns out in my state) write in Nader and Camejo. When they
challenge me on that I tell them simply and firmly that I'm not going to
vote for some billionaire who is promising to continue the Iraq war
throughout his whole term, who admits the reasons for it were a lie but
says he would have also done it anyways. 

The reactions are surprising. People get it. And they say things like
that they hope Kerry will pull out or change course. But they respect
it. Kerry's gung-ho, pro-war "look at all my medals" position is deeply
disturbing to the antiwar half of the population, which is where Kerry
has to get ALL of his votes over and above the party regulars.

So that is going to suppress his vote greatly. Whether the hatred of
Bush is enough to overcome this is anyone's guess, but it wouldn't
surprise me.

Joaquín


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