How I did

Let's see how I did with my predictions:

(1) Obama did win with 300+ electoral votes--and he won all the state I said he would.  Didn't get North Carolina.  I was right about the attempted voter suppression but Obama's victory was too big to be derailed by Republican criminal voter suppression. 

(2) The Democrats did great in the Senate, increasing their majority by two seats.  Akin and Mourdoch were crushed.  Hooray!  Wisconsin elected the first out lesbian senator--Tammy Baldwin.

(3) The Democrats did increase their membership in the House but fell well short of a majority.  I was off there.  Alas, Michele Bachmann and Steve King won.  But don't despair:  the nutcases Allen West and Joe Walsh were defeated.  New gay members were elected; present gay members were re-elected.  This is a triumph for gay people.

(4) All the gay marriage ballot measures won.  Gay marriage is now legal in Maine, Maryland, and Washington.  In 2009 Maine voted to overturn gay marriage law--a bitter defeat for gays. But decent people in Maine fought back and three years later they've won.  Hooray!  I was wrong about Maryland:  the victory was big!  And that victory is due in large part to Barack Obama publicly supporting gay marriage.  He changed the game among black voters.  Thank you, sir.  All measures carried with clear majorities that parallel the national majority now favoring gay marriage.  Gay marriage and marriage equality are now mainstream American politics.  The proposed anti-gay marriage state constitutional amendment in Minnesota failed by a clear majority.  Forty years of anti-gay hate mongering in that state have been utterly defeated.  This is a truly sweet victory.  And there's great news in Iowa.  State supreme court justice Wiggins was retained after a vicious, slanderous attack on him because he voted for gay marriage equality three years ago.  Further, the state senate remains Democratic; majority leader Mike Gronstal refused to present to the senate a Republican state constitutional amendment banning gay marriage; he's still majority leader and he's sworn never to present such an amendment to the senate while he remains leader.  Gay marriage in Iowa is now secure.

I think I did pretty well.  I quit listening to the barrage of news media and blogger BS in the last month of the campaign.  All that blather about Romney's momentum was absurd; the polls reflected nothing of the sort.  The TV pundits are know-nothings; same for political bloggers. Why anyone cares what they think is beyond me.  The national polling was off; Obama won a clear majority of votes; there was no deadlock or tie. The battleground states polling was spot on: Obama was always ahead in those states and always had a winning electoral vote count. The polls told anybody who wanted to see that Romney was trapped inside his base of the Old Confederacy and couldn't find a way out.  He was NEVER a viable national candidate.

This has been the watershed year for gay Americans.  We're now mainstream citizens, no longer fringe or freak or marginal.  We're a mainstream part of the only truly national party, the Democrat Party.  The cause of marriage equality is now mainstream politics.  Anti-gay is losing politics.  Period.  I remember the dark days of 1977 when the hate campaign against gay people was raging across America. We were aliens in our own country.  The religious right wingers have used anti-gay hate for 40+ years.  They've done enormous damage to gay people and to the country in general.  They've divided communities and families--all for raw political power and nothing else.  Their time has come and gone.  It's a new day for gay people in America. 

We persevered, we fought back, and now we've won. How's that for the American dream come true? 

Here are my predictions

For the record:

(1) Obama wins with 300+ electoral votes.  He wins Nevada, Colorado, Ohio, Virginia, and Florida.  Maybe North Carolina.  This despite some pretty astounding vote suppression shenanigans on election day.

(2) Democrats increase their numbers in the Senate by 1 or 2 seats.  They win Indiana.  We get the first lesbian senator in Wisconsin.  Akin goes down the crapper.

(3) Democrats increase their numbers in the House but fall just short of a majority. Michele Bachmann is defeated.  Steve King in Iowa is defeated.  Tea Party kooks get clobbered.

(4) Marriage equality wins in Washington state (big margin), Maine (big margin), and Maryland (narrow margin). The anti-gay constitutional amendment in Minnesota just barely fails by a few hundred votes.  Democrats keep control of the Iowa state senate and thus prevent Republicans from pushing an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment through the legislature.  Iowa Supreme Court Justice Wiggins is retained.  2012 becomes the watershed year in the struggle for gay equality.  From here on the anti-gay forces get chewed up and spat out.  They're finished as a political force.

(5) The Republican Party ceases to exist as a national party and becomes a collection of regional factions with irreconcilable differences.  The 44-year-old Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon--wedge issue race-baiting and inflaming the racial hatred of angry white males--dies an ignoble death.  Leaderless, agenda-less Republicans descend into intra-party civil war.

You read it here first.  Cross your fingers.

Who's ahead?

Are you getting frustrated with the deluge of polls--national and local?  I am.  I've really just about had enough of these ridiculous polls that claim Romney is ahead by .7% or Obama is ahead by .6% with a error margin of +/- 3%.  Hello?  Nobody can know who is ahead when the tallies for both candidates fall withing the margin of error.  The margin of error is the "we can't tell" zone of a poll.  All you can properly say is that both candidates are statistically tied. 

If Smith tallies 47% and Jones tallies 46% and the margin of error is +/- 4.5%, Smith is NOT ahead of Jones; neither is Jones trailing Smith.  The only proper interpretation to be made is that Smith and Jones are statistically tied.  You can't claim an accuracy finer grained and more detailed than that which the polling results permit.  If you do, then you're a fool because there's simply no statistical basis on which to make that claim.  The uncertainty (otherwise known as the margin for error) simply won't let you make such a precise claim.  Imprecision rules.

Right now in the battleground states Obama and Romney are in statistical ties in many races, like Ohio.  No possible poll can tell you who is "ahead" (whatever that may mean).  People who claim otherwise--like bloggers and other internet bloviators--are idiots.  They don't understand elementary statistics.  Tune them out.  Also tune out the all-too-confident chatterers on TV news shows or on YouTube or on whatever venue you find them.  They can't know what they claim to know.  Nobody can.

Unless something causes a sudden break away from one candidate to the other, we're going to have to wait until November 6 to find out "who's ahead."  For now, it's neck and neck.  And that's all you can say about the race.  Period.

The Five Stages of the Romney Campaign

Where are we in the Romney campaign?  Denial?  Anger?  Bargaining? Depression?  Acceptance?  We seem to be in a mish-mash of all five.  Romney is denying that there's anything wrong with his campaign.  Republican pooh-bahs are angry that he won't take their sage advice. News media blowhards are bargaining that the debates will keep his campaign (and their jobs) alive.  The Republican rank-and-file are getting really depressed.  Nobody yet (except for me) accepts that Romney is one of the walking dead and these last five weeks of the election are purely pro forma.  Unless in the October 3 debate Barack Obama tells the nation that he really is (1) a crypto-Muslim, (2) Kenyan, (3) Indonesian, (4) Saul Alinsky's love child, (5) a Communist, (6) a Socialist, (7) a Liberal, (8) an illegal alien, (9) Satan's little helper,  and (10) the anti-Christ, the campaign is finito.  Obama wins; Romney loses and takes the entire Republican ticket down with him.  You don't win a national campaign in the last weeks of the election.  You win months before election day when you persuade people that you are a serious candidate with serious things to say.  Maybe it takes months for your message to settle in--Americans are very slow thinkers--but you lay the foundation for victory a long time before you claim it on election night.

Romney is a house built on sand; he has no foundation.  He ran as the default candidate.  You don't like Obama; then by default you'll vote for Romney.  He made no case for himself; he proposed nothing; he offered no vision.  You'd think that somebody who has spent his life in corporations at least would have adopted that fatuous corporate happy-talk about goals and aspirations and team-work. But no, Romney can't manage even that inane level of discourse.  It's just:  here I am, vote 4 me.

Nope, the nation ain't buying what Romney's peddling.  They know a knock-off when they see one.  He's fake.  Not just skin-deep fake.  He's fake all the way to the bone.  He lies.  He distorts. He flips and he flops.  He says whatever the moment seems to require.  There's simply nothing genuine about Mitt Romney.  Republican primary voters smelled the stink of fakery he emits; that's why they didn't vote for him; he won the nomination solely because he had more money than anybody else and outlasted his poorly funded opponents.  Can't do that in a national election.  Not even when the Koch brothers and Sheldon Adelson are your sugar daddies.  A national candidate has to have substance.  Shadows have more substance than Mitt Romney.

This election is over and done with at the presidential level.  Congress is another question.  Romney's failure is poisoning Republicans all across the country.  The Senate, once thought to be a Republican chamber in waiting, has now moved beyond them.  Contests that a month ago were no-contest are now heating up with Republicans fighting to keep their own seats.  The House is in play.  I'm out on a limb here:  I think the Democrats will take the House with a tiny 5-7 seat majority.  Some governorships and statehouses will fall to the Democrats.  On the Wednesday morning after election night, we'll wake up in a country that has only one national party, the Democrat Party, and a regional party, the Republican Party, that is quarantined to the states of the Old Confederacy and a scattering of small central and western states.  The Republicans are trapped by their base of angry, embittered white males.  The Southern Strategy of Richard Nixon is now their prison. 

It's possible that we've seen the last Republican president.  The party may shatter into two:  one party for the reactionary fundamentalist whites-only kooks; one party for secular conservatives.  Neither would be a national party capable of winning elections and governing.  Looks like we're in for a generation of Democrats in the White House.  Given a party full of Todd Akins and Michele Bachmanns, that's not such a bad future.  If you're inclined to disagree, pause for a few moments and ruminate about this:  President Rick Santorum.

Gutted like a fish

The case for Proposition 8 has just been gutted by one of the two witnesses who testified in favor of it--David Blankenhorn, founder of some preposterous pseudo-think tank called "Institute for American Values." You might remember that almost all the witnesses the pro-Prop 8 side wanted to call ran away and hid because they didn't want to be identified in public with the anti-gay haters (apparently their anti-gay hate was a private thing). Only Blankenhorn and one other witness had the guts to persevere. Not a good career move that.  Plaintiff co-counsel David Boies absolutely shredded Blankenhorn on the stand, so much so that Judge Vaughn Walker ruled that Blankenhorn--called as a supposedly expert witness--was in fact an expert in nothing but peddling his own opinions and struck his testimony from the record. 

Well, this media hound is back and now he's evolved.  In a New York Times op-ed he's announced that he's willing to accept the inevitability of gay marriage.  How big of him.  He still thinks it's crap but he's sniffed the air and that sweet smell of victory ain't coming from his side.  So he's jumped ship much to the chagrin of the pro-Prop 8 gang who are desperately trying to cobble together a viable appeal. 

I'm willing to bet a dollar that Blankenhorn's now ex-friends among the anti-gay crusaders are just itching to get this treacherous, two-faced SOB in a dark alley and slit his throat.  Take a number, guys, and get in line.  There's no honor among bigots, especially among bigots of the religious right. 

Every day now there's some new blow against the anti-gay right.  They're falling apart.  November is their Waterloo.  They're going to lose big and bad in four states.  And then the Supreme Court will invalidate Prop 8 and DOMA.  And then it's all over but the victory parade.  Gay Pride 2013 is going to be a celebration to remember!

Deja vu all over again

In Washington state Referendum 74 has now qualified for the ballot.  This referendum asks voters to approve or reject a recent law that permits gay marriage.  This may sound familiar because in 2009 voters were presented with Referendum 71 in which the civil unions created by law in 2007 were upgraded to "marriage in everything but name" status.  Despite howls of outrage from people who think that the lives and rights of gay people meaning nothing, that ballot measure won 53% to 47%, the first general election victory for gay civil unions in the country.  Now Washington voters are being asked to remove the preposterous and phony distinction between civil marriage and civil union.  The most recent poll has 54% of Washington state voters agreeing with the new law.

This referendum is one of four watershed ballot measures in November.  Maryland will vote on keeping its new gay marriage law; Maine will vote to restore a gay marriage law that was rejected by voters in 2009; Minnesota will vote on a state constitutional amendment defining marriage as one man-one woman thus outlawing gay marriage.  Given the sea change in opinion that has occurred since 2009 and the great change in support among black voters since Barack Obama's announcement of support for gay marriage, all four ballot measures can be won.  Current polling in each state indicates that the pro-gay voters outnumber the anti-gay voters.

I'd say that the anti-gay demagogues have made the fundamental error that all demagogues make:  they believe that they can whip up mob hate time after time whenever and wherever the situation demands. They never consider the inescapable truth that sooner or later the mob tires of its hates and dwindles away.  True believers never understand that only they are 100% committed; everybody else is usually along for the ride while it's fun but will jump off the train when some new entertainment beckons.  There's a world of difference between demagoguery and dedication.  The gay haters are demagogues; gays are dedicated to their rights and equality before the law. The demagogues have run their course.  Nobody's listening to them now.  Their lies are hollow.  They've foretold doom and gloom too often.  Nobody believes them.  They convince nobody.  Mostly now only fossilized prejudice keeps the anti-gays in business.  There's no passion, no conviction, no confidence on their side any more.  Even they know that their cause is lost.  In November the whole world will see their ruin.  I can't wait!

DOMA DOA

This week a three-judge panel of the 1st circuit of the US Court of Appeals struck down as unconstitutional the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA) of 1996. This was the infamous Republican election-year attack on the human rights of gay people cowardly signed into law by that treacherous sack of shit Bill Clinton. The act was authored principally by then-Congressman Bob Barr of Georgia, a man with so much respect for traditional marriage that he's had three of them himself, the first two of which ended in divorce. Barr later repudiated DOMA while he ran a frivolous campaign for the presidency as the nominee of the Libertarian party, a party affiliation he repudiated in 2012 in favor of renewing his previously repudiated Republican party affiliation in a failed attempt to regain a seat in Congress. That's the kind of unscrupulous, unprincipled man the right-wing champions as a defender of traditional morality.

So heading to the Supreme Court are two critical gay-rights cases: Proposition 8 in California and DOMA. They'll arrive sometime after the November election. Their disposition will in large part depend on what happens in Washington state, Maine, Maryland, and Minnesota. The former three have gay marriage on the ballot; the latter has a state constitutional amendment prohibiting gay marriage up for a vote. If we win all four--and that seems probable now that opinion is rapidly turning our way after Mr. Obama's announcement supporting gay marriage--then there are good reasons to anticipate victory in the Supreme Court mostly, I think, because nobody on the Court (except Scalia) wants to be this generation's Roger Tawney.

You'll remember from your US history that in 1857 Chief Justice Roger Tawney wrote the majority opinion in the Dred Scott case and won for himself undying infamy. By all accounts Tawney was a decent man, a Maryland Catholic who had freed his own slaves and personally opposed slavery. But as a judge he believed himself bound to uphold the letter of the Constitution, which of course permitted slavery and defined black people as three-fifths of a citizen (for that read "white people"). Tawney's legalism overrode his morality and his memory has been reviled ever since.

The Court can plainly see that the tide of history is flowing in the direction of full, equal civil rights for gay people. No justice wants to be a member of Tawney's gallery of rogues. So I'm guessing that after the election the Court will use the victories in these four elections as the foundation for a leap forward in gay rights: it will uphold the unconstitutionality of DOMA, thus requiring the federal government to recognize gay marriages; and it will uphold equal marriage for gay people as a basic civil right.

And when the Court so rules, the game's over--we'll have won!