The day is Friday 31^st October 2008 four days before the U.S. Presidential election. Senators Barack Obama, John McCain and their respective running mates have done all they can to ensure victory in what is the longest and costliest election campaign of any country. However, things are about to change dramatically.

At about 15:00 CET a Middle-Eastern television network airs a video tape by Al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden in which he once again threatens American with grave consequences and reminds them of their vulnerability due to two bleeding wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the failed economic policies of the Bush Administration. This tape is replayed by all major U.S networks and web cast throughout the weekend. Terrified American once again vote for the candidate with national security credentials and help put Sen. McCain and Governor Sarah Palin in the White House.

The above scenario (October Surprise), may be unlikely this time around. What is the October Surprise? It is a news event with the potential to influence the outcome of an election, particularly one for the presidency. This is exactly what happened in 2004 as Professor Joseph Nye has reminded us in his recent comment in The Financial Times (15.10.08) “On October 29 2004, four days before the last election, Al Jazeera aired an 18 minute video tape in which Osama bin Laden addressed the American people and threatened further retaliation and a desire to bankrupt the US. In the first poll after that tape was released, President George W. Bush opened up a six point lead over Senator John Kerry. The deputy director of the CIA commented that “Bin Laden certainly did a nice favour today for the president”.

Osama Bin Laden fears that the election of Brack Obama will be harmful to his war against the U.S in particular and the West in general as Obama may withdraw troops from Afghanistan and Iraq in an orderly manner before the Congressional mid-term elections in November 2010. He may also take meaningful steps to improve relations with the Arab and Islamic world. This would dry up recruits for Bin Laden’s misguided cause which has been rejected by most moderate Muslims who have been the main victims of his violent campaign since September 11^th 2001. An Obama victory would destroy Osama’s raison d'etre.

To win the presidency, Senator Obama, inter alia, has to still overcome several other challenges such as centuries of racial prejudice, an exotic name (Barack Hussein Obama), biracial heritage, and suspicions about his religious affiliation, potential assassination plots and a gaffe-prone Catholic running mate, Senator Joseph Biden who many Americans consider to be a consummate Washington insider. Biden’s selection did nothing to reinforce Obama’s message of bringing change to Washington.

Many white Americans mistakenly believe that Sen. Obama is a Muslim because his father was a Muslim from Kenya and Obama spent part of his childhood in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country. Barack Obama´s name has been misspelt as "Barack Osama" in one New York State County (Rensselaer), ballot paper, others have said OSAMA BIN LADEN = OBAMA BIDEN.

Questions are also being raised whether Obama will be a victim of the Bradley Effect?             

The Bradley effect, less commonly referred to as the Wilder effect, explains the alleged discrepancy between voter opinion polls and election outcomes in American political campaigns when a white candidate and a non-white candidate run against each other.    Named for Tom Bradley, an African-American who lost the 1982 California governor's race despite being ahead in some voter polls, the Bradley effect refers to an alleged tendency on the part of some voters to tell pollsters that they are undecided or likely to vote for a black candidate, and yet, on election day, vote for his/her white opponent.

Perhaps the most dangerous fallacy about a U.S. Presidential election is that it will be free and fair. As has been seen in the most recent elections/selections in 2000 and 2004, the winner was not the one who won the most number of popular votes but the one who had the most aggressive lawyers. When George W. Bush was selected president by a Supreme Count decision on 12^th December 2000 the Chief Justice the late William Rehnquist remarked that the real loser was the Supreme Court. In fact it was the American people who lost in 2000 and again in 2004 when Bush beat John Kerry in a disputed election which centred on fraud in Ohio.

The fraud in Ohio in November 2004 by the Republican Party is well detailed in several books including those by Steven Rosenfeld, What Happened in Ohio: A Documentary Record of Theft and Fraud in the 2004 Election  and Fooled Again: How The Right Stole The 2004 Election & Why They'll Steal The Next One Too (unless We Stop Them), by Professor Mark Crispin Miller. His most recent book on elections is, Loser Take All: Election Fraud and The Subversion of Democracy, 2000 – 2008.

Apart from the consistent and concerted effort by Republicans to steal elections there are problems with ballot paper designs and electronic voting machines as pointed out in a New York Times editorial (23.07.08). A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law lists 13 ballot problems that show up around the country in election after election. One is creating a layout in which it is unclear what hole voters need to punch to cast a vote for a particular candidate. Another is placing more than one contest on the same screen of a computer voting machine, which often leads voters not to vote in one of the races. Making matters worse, the instructions that accompany ballots are often confusing.

Senator Obama is likely to be further disadvantaged as convicts are disenfranchised and most of them are African-American males as was seen in the 2000 election in the Miami-Dade county in Florida, they will be struck off the voter registry. Most members of the two largest minorities in the U.S. African Americans and Hispanics vote Democrat and since they are at the lowest rungs of the socio-economic ladder they are the most likely to face the greatest obstacles in casting their ballots on Election Day. With many Congressional, Gubernatorial and local elections taking place on the same day there is ample room for errors and confusion as well. Several other post election irregularities are foreseen:

The issues of caging lists and other techniques of voter suppression which gave rise to many 2004 United States election voting controversies have not been addressed by further legislation or a regulatory crackdown, and are predicted by Greg Palast (a reporter who has investigated these controversies,) to recur to the extent that they could swing the result.

Voter list purges using unlawful criteria threaten election integrity in at least six swing states: Colorado, Indiana, Ohio, Michigan, Nevada and North Carolina.

The Republican Lt. Governor of Montana, John Bohlinger, has accused the Montana Republican Party of vote caging to purge 6,000 voters from three counties which trend Democratic. These purges included decorated war veterans and active duty soldiers.

An allegation that the Republican Party in Michigan plans to challenge the eligibility of voters based on lists of foreclosed homes has led to a lawsuit from the Obama campaign and a letter from the House Judiciary Committee to the Department of Justice calling for an investigation.

Unfortunately after eight years not meaningful electoral reforms have neither been implemented nor tested and in typical American fashion most government operations are undertaken by private contractors (corporations), who always favour their rich paymasters at the cost of the poor citizen - the best democracy money can buy. The rich and white-dominated Electoral College will make its choice of President on December 15 2008. Over the past eight years under Bush/Cheney the U.S. went from a plutocracy to a kleptocracy and under McCain & Palin it will be a gerontocracy/idiocracy.

This writer who is an Obama supporter worries primarily about what an Obama defeat would do for U.S. race relations at a time when the U.S. economy is in recession (Americans are still in denial about recession). It would be ironic if he lost as he along with ex President Bill Clinton and former Veep candidate Senator John Edwards helped to beat the Democratic candidate who had the best chance of being elected – President, Senator Hillary Clinton. As the late night stand-up comedian Jay Leno recently quipped, you know who's got to be depressed about all of this? Hillary Clinton. I mean, look at this woman. She works hard, goes to Wellesley, goes to Yale, graduates with honors, devotes her entire life to public service. Now she's starting to realize if she had just put on some makeup and shot a moose, she'd be on her way to the   White House.

Senator Barack Obama employed the same tactics used by Governor Bill Clinton, the man from Hope, in 1992 to win the Democratic Party nomination by beating the latter’s wife. Now will they help him to become President? This election has now become a contest between meritocracy and idiocracy. Who apart from Osama Bin Laden or will once again determine the direction that the U.S will take from mid-day 20^th January 2009? Hopefully this time the American people will not let terror and fear dictate their choice.

Those who cast the votes decide nothing, those who count the votes decide everything -      Joseph Stalin (1879 - 1953), Soviet leader

Relevant  links*

Beware an October surprise from bin Laden

http://ft.onet.pl/0,15931,beware_an_october_surprise_from_bin_laden,artykul_ft.html

October surprise

In American political jargon, an October surprise is a news event with the potential to influence the outcome of an election, particularly one for the presidency. The reference to the month of October is due to the fact that the first Tuesday after the first Monday in November is the date for national elections (as well as many state and local elections), and therefore events that take place in late October have greater potential to influence the decisions of prospective voters.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_surprise

Bradley effect

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley_effect

Another voting disaster waiting to happen

…A study by the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law lists 13 ballot problems that show up around the country in election after election. One is creating a layout in which it is unclear what hole voters need to punch to cast a vote for a particular candidate. Another is placing more than one contest on the same screen of a computer voting machine, which often leads voters not to vote in one of the races. Making matters worse, the instructions that accompany ballots are often confusing…

 http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/07/24/opinion/edvote.php

United States presidential election, 2008

Election controversies

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_election,_2008

The Tonight Show with Jay Leno

http://www.nbc.com/The_Tonight_Show_with_Jay_Leno

The Search for a Running Mate

…Question: Do you think Gore might take Hillary Clinton as his running mate? That in turn may compel Bush to name Elizabeth Dole as his. This means that in the new millennium the U.S. will finally join the list of countries which have had women at their highest political levels. This would be a great victory for gender equality and the world at large. Coming from Sri Lanka, I strongly feel that the U.S. should become a modern society as my country did when we elected the world's first female head of government in 1960. She, Ms. Sirimavo Bandaranaike, is currently our prime minister too. And our current president is also a woman. …

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/campaigns/junkie/archive/junkie031700.htm

South Asia hopes to gain from Bush win

Below is a selection of readers' comments on this subject.

Sri Lanka welcomes the re-election of President George W Bush. He is determined to consistently fight the global war against terrorism. Since September 11 2001, the LTTE and the Sri Lankan government have been forced to talk peace and I hope that there will be a permanent political solution within the unitary state of Sri Lanka before the end of the President's second term as the Bush Administration is the major behind the scenes player in the Sri Lanka peace process. We also need to address the causes of terrorism. Prevention is better than cure. Ravindra Wickremasinghe, Vienna, Austria

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/south_asia/3981185.stm

Idiocracy

Idiocracy is a 2006 American dark comedy directed by Mike Judge, and starring Luke Wilson and Maya Rudolph. The two main characters sign up for a military hibernation experiment that goes awry, and they awaken 500 years in the future. They discover that the world has devolved into a dystopia where marketing, commercialism, and cultural anti-intellectualism run rampant and dysgenic pressure has resulted in a uniformly stupid human society…

…A narrator explains that natural selection is indifferent to intelligence, so that in a society in which intelligence is systematically debased, stupid people easily out-breed the intelligent, creating, over the course of five centuries, an irremediably dysfunctional society. Demographic superiority favours those least likely to advance society.[1] Consequently, the children of the educated élites are drowned in a sea of sexually promiscuous, illiterate, alcoholic, proletarian peers…

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idiocracy

The Power of Nightmares: The Rise of the Politics of Fear (2004)

Part 1 (Part 2) (Part 3)

"This documentary offers a remarkable insight into the reality of our current fear induced climate. Adam Curtis chronicles the rise of neo-conservatism and the resulting change in the world's political agenda orchestrated by those who place their trust in the philosophical ideal of the necessity of evil to unite a country. The filmmaker manages to successfully pluck apart the myth of the reality of there being a logistically organized terror network, let alone one that is managing to orchestrate terror attacks from a cave in the remote mountains of Afghanistan. His arguments are backed up by some eye opening interviews with authorities on the field of Islamic fundamentalism, members of the US government and members of the US judicial system. These insights are parred with concrete, startling facts and the result is a program that manages to shake us awake making us aware of a far more realistic terror threat namely that of psychological warfare carried out by the powers that be, accompanied by a sensationalist media frenzy. I cannot recommend this program highly enough." -imdb.com

http://www.moviesfoundonline.com/power_of_nightmares.php

*All links valid as at 28.10.08

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