Friday, November 9, 2012

Florida and the Dodged Bullet

At last glance Barak Obama led Mitt Romney by 56,000 votes in sunny Florida. Things are far enough along there at last that Brother Romney has conceded defeat which pushed the electoral college vote to 332-206 in favor of the president. That would be just about opposite of what GOP operative Dick Morris promised FOX NEWS devotees last week. When questioned about his numbers prior to the election Morris assured the FOX anchor that he read polls for a living, so he knew what he was talking about.

Yes and Ed Wood Jr. knew how to make movies, but that doesn't mean they were any good. I mean "Plan 9 From Outer Space" isn't really considered a film  masterpiece and wasn't exactly boffo at the box office.

Be that as it may most "experts" felt there were nine battleground states that would swing the election one way or the other. Counting Florida, Barak Obama carried eight of them.

The nation is all fine and good now if you're a democrat and a liberal, but the truth is there was something a bit sinister in the way the election was conducted and is still being tabulated in Florida.

Republican congresswoman Ilena Ros-Lehtinen bluntly called the process in her home state, "a disaster." Susan MacManus of the University of South Florida was quoted as saying, "Get the job done. Get it fixed! Right now! Florida doesn't need this type of embarrassment."

Then there is former Tampa mayor, Pam Iorio. She said, "It's an embarrassment. Had the numbers been a little different this would have been a repeat of 2000. We wouldn't have hanging chads, but we'd have a newer version of it. As a Floridian I find it very disturbing to me."

Indeed, something does seem to be rotten in the state of Florida, which is run by republican governor, Rick Scott. The ballot approached a novella length, ten pages and early voting was curtailed. Voters were forced to stand in lines for hours upon hours Tuesday. Then finally the results went off into never never land and still haven't fully returned.

The suspicious side of me thinks things in Florida went down exactly the way Governor Scott wanted them to. One has to feel that he, like almost everyone other than Morris, believed the national election would be decided by merest of margins. Every thing he did prior to Tuesday was geared to suppress the vote and everything he did on Tuesday was engineered to make it so dreadfully painful to vote that people would just give up and go home.

In fact, a person such as myself might suspect that he was planning a November surprise. That he, Rick Scott, through the Florida election board, was going to make a president and hand deliver the election to Mitt Romney.

There was only one flaw in the plan. Obama whacked Romney early and often so the nefarious plot was rendered useless. Instead of holding the election and therefore the nation hostage and becoming a conservative hero, Scott and the Florida election commission simply ended up looking like incompetent boobs. So much so a conservative friend of mine declared last night, only half jokingly, that Florida should never be allowed to participate in a national election again.

You know you've screwed the pooch when your own people are saying things like that.

So now we move onward as Obama settles in for a second term. The GOP right wing is howling that if only a true conservative had been their candidate they would have won. Right. One can only imagine how well Rick Santorum would have fared against this president. That total of 332 would be so much higher a hole would have been punched through the roof.

In truth it is hard not to gloat after watching the people at FOX and certain radio outlets do nothing but demonize Barak Obama for nearly a half decade. We should remember a couple of things however. One is that if you're a liberal don't become as dependent on the wags at MSNBC as the conservatives did on the yahoos at FOX. And two, if a couple of percentage points had gone the other way in three or four states, Rick Scott would be personally deciding the 2012 presidential race either today, or next week.

It was a bullet we dodged by inches.

But enough reflection, I believe it is time for that bottle of Samuel Adams and the weekend.

regnat populus

11-9-12







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