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
We’ve got it all.
Hurricane Sandy.
God’s revenge for the nonpersoning of Ron Paul.
Watch.
Headed right for DC.
Getting right to the heart of the matter.
Watch.
Later…
AG
I just noticed you had posted the Burns poem and beat me to it by a few hours. Great minds I guess. Sorry to step on your line AG.
In fairness, Axelrod is not under obligations to look Presidential.
And delegation is a wonderful thing at this stage–if the Governor of New Jersey and the Governor of Pennsylvania are not going to play hardball politics with people’s welfare. The action right now is between FEMA and the governors–until the storm actually strikes land and there is a good estimate of its impact.
What Bush did was hamstring Gov. Blanco so that Bobby Jindal could look good. In previous hurricanes, what President Obama has done is to be quite willing to share the photo-ops with Republican governors.
And Katrina was a category 5 storm before it reached land. Sandy is a category 1 storm that will soak up to 8 inches of rain on Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The issues will depend on how much the ground is already soaked and the wind speed on land. Major difficulty is likely to be downed power lines. I’m sure that as soon as it passes NC, Duke Energy will be dispatching mutual aid teams northward.
And most of the impact will be clearly known by Nov 2.
We’ll see, won’t we.
Bet on it.
My own take?
No matter who loses, they’ll blame it on the weather.
Watch.
Whadda buncha maroons.
AG
On the subject of intervening events, I just ran across this story today and have been wondering how seriously to take it. There aren’t really any appropriate threads going on the main page atm for it, but maybe it belongs here.
As I wrote in my article The Third Debate/The Romney Debacle: A Picture Is Worth A Thousand Words:
I also wrote in the above article:
But you really don’t need a weatherman to know which way that wind is blowing if the wind is being created by a Hollywood-style wind machine.
This nation has in the grips of a gigantic criminal enterprise at least since 1963 and the JFK assassination. Only an act of God/an active accident/some sort of “big intervening event” can save it. If nothing out of the ordinary happens then the ordinary is what does happen, and “the ordinary” in post-1960s America has been the results of that ongoing gigantic criminal enterprise.
I do not believe that high-level political operatives like Obama, Axelrod, the Clintons or their counterparts in the Republican Party are innocent of knowledge about this situation. The Gore and Kerry folds in the face of massive vote fraud in 2000 and 2004 told me everything that I need to know regarding that idea. Perhaps there are Dem pols who stand in opposition to it but realize that the game must be played according to criminal rules because that’s just the way it is here now, I dunno. But I do know this…the crooks have not yet become so omnipotent that they can control the weather.
I hope.
As Martin Luther King Jr. said:
Let us pray that justice is blowing in this wind.
Let us pray.
Later…
AG
.
Your link to IT specialist Michael Connell in the most important loss to the Republican cheating in close, swing states. I believe in the Presidential elections all you need is to switch 2.5% of the Ocama votes to Romney tally (a 5% shift) to win the state. This was done in 2000 in Florida and in 2004 in Ohio state, see Ken Blackwell. The ugliest face of a nation , pretending to be exceptional. Not counting votes, frustrating voters at the polling station and election fraud makes the US the laughing stock in the wprld. See my diary about Texas – Grab Your Gun, the Socialists Are Coming to TX.
Josh Whedon for the
Romney Zombie Apocalypse