A 60 Point Spread

Obama is up to a more comfortable 60 electoral vote advantage over Romney (O 299 - R 239) and there looks to be a 90% probability of Democrats holding control of the Senate. I think those margins may inch up somewhat more, with Obama taking 310 to 330 electoral votes, a respectable margin over the 270 needed to win the election.

Today the world's oddest couple, Obama and Governor Chris Christie, are going to be the news as they tour New Jersey's hurricane damage. Romney has very pointedly not been invited to come to New Jersey and say stupid things, which means he will be struggling to appear relevant and coherent, while saying "Gosh" and "Golly" a bit too many times to be believable. About the only thing Romney could do to breath some life into his flagging campaign would be to tell someone to get fucked, but that's not likely. "Sandy" seems to have helped the public focus on reality vs. posturing. I continue to believe that the election is essentially over, with either a flatline or a steady GOP slide in the final week. Any last-minute Omigod! moments have been outgunned by the tangible reality that the climate and the oceans really do matter, and FEMA is a pretty decent way of sharing the risks among all fifty states.

I find it telling that Romney is collecting plastic bags full of canned goods, something he may have learned in his Boy Scout days. Or his kid's Scouting days. Our youngest is an Eagle Scout, so I spent a lot of time with Scouts and I respect the organization, but FEMA it ain't. Interestingly, many Mormon boys are encouraged to join the Boy Scouts, which made me wonder whether Romney was a Boy Scout? For a Boy Scout to gather together a gang in a Private School and hold down another student so Romney could give him a forced haircut would have been very much against the Scout Code. It turns out that Romney was not a Scout, nor an Eagle Scout, but three of his sons are Eagle Scouts and Romney has been on the Boy Scouts Board for ten years. It is not clear he learned anything, except to collect canned goods.

Romney seems increasingly desperate, showing easily debunked ads that claim that Chrysler is planning to ship all Jeep production to China, which the Italian head of Chrysler issued a scathing rebuttal of in a mass mailing and e-mailing to all of the Jeep workers in Ohio and Michigan. To the contrary, some Jeep plants are working double shifts, employment is up by thousands and sales have tripled. There are no plans to move that production offshore. That information, now being widely disseminated in Ohio, makes Romney seem like a pathological liar and desperate propagandist, which I would suggest that he is. Rather than taking the high road, my hunch is that Romney is going to try to double down on his Hitlerian/Joseph Goebbels "Big Lie" tactics in this last week, in hopes of brainwashing the "truly clueless" class of voters. Fortunately a lot of them are Union Members and the Unions think Romney is a dickhead. I think the net effect will be to energize his opponents, rather than convert them to his version of Scientology and Fantasy. Some Americans may be a bit slow to catch on, but they don't like being lied to.

When this election is over I predict that there are going to be a lot of confessions from pundits and reporters about what a jerk they always secretly thought Romney was. They've kept the false meme of "a close race" going as long as was needed to keep viewership up, but now I think the storm is a better story, so they don't need to spin the "Romney could win" fantasy any longer.

In the interests of full disclosure I should mention that I disliked George H. W. Bush so intensely that I felt certain that some Iran-Contra dirt would come out about him before the election and sink him like a rock. So I called up a bookmaker in London and put a $1,000 bet on him to lose. Not the best gamble I've ever made, so I vowed to make donations in the future, rather than try to be a predator, which I came to see as bad Karma. In this election I've given some modest support to Elizabeth Warren, one of the smarter and more principled candidates I've seen in years. The Republicans hate her because she is so damn smart and so principled, while having such a clear sense of what is needed to do to protect American consumers from Predatory Banking. We all should be taking our funds out of Major Banks and putting them in Credit Unions. I like the Oregon Community Credit Union myself; they provide fantastic service and operate on honest business practices. How old-fashioned of them!

And that's what I think is needed right now... a return to honest business practices and straight talk. Mitt Romney is pretty much the polar opposite of that, which I think many Americans are beginning to understand. Lastly, it has nothing to do with Romney being a Mormon, though I think many will be conscious of that. Senator Harry Reid is also a Mormon, which strongly suggests that there are good Mormons and wingnut Mormons. This election may have a catalytic effect on whether Mormons lean strongly conservative Republican in recent decades. I think when more is known about Romney's tax dodging, some of which appears related to his donations to the Mormon Church, they will be doing some soul-searching.

Arthur