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http://slacktivist.typepad.com/slacktivist/2008/10/racism-and-litigation.html How very strange it is these days to hear Sen. John McCain and his surrogates constantly vacillating between calls for (undefined) "Reform!" and scapegoating condemnations of "Reform Now." What do they want? Reform! And when do they want it? Not now. If you're not a racist bastard living in the fever-dream of a post-fact surreality, then you'll appreciate this summary of the confusions and distortions in the latest round of ritual attacks and scapegoating leveled at ACORN. And no, it's not an overstatement or an uncharitable characterization to say that anyone swallowing this ACORN-scapegoating is insane and a racist bastard. This is a baseless assertion that begins with the argument that poor people and black people are the powers that be in America -- that they run the show. That's insane. It's laughable on its face to anyone not infected by the voluntary mental illness of old-fashioned American racism. It's also worth pointing out that former U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzalez may one day wind up in prison for his role in promoting this crazy racist lie. His Justice department, at the behest of Karl Rove, tried to enlist the nation's U.S. Attorneys to help promote this myth of the All Powerful ACORN. Eight of them -- all Republicans -- refused because these "voter fraud" allegations were baseless and there seemed to be no legal point to them, only a political attempt to intimidate black voters, scaring them away from the polls. This is the kind of desperation move you only resort to if you're convinced there's no other way for your party to win at the polls. It's not surprising, then, that the Republicans are pushing this ACORN nonsense now. They're looking at the same numbers as the rest of us, and what they saw during the primaries had to have them spooked. Here, in graph form, are some figures from the primary season earlier this year (all from here). First, a look at total Republican votes cast (in red) vs. total Democratic votes cast (in blue) in six swing states: 
I'm not cherry picking six lopsided states to make this look worse than it is for the Republicans. If I'd had more time, I could have made many more of these. I find all that blue rather delightful. Here's another pie chart showing the total Republican/Democratic votes cast in all six states, plus one that's even worse news for the GOP. The graph on the right below shows the total votes cast for the Republican winner vs. the total votes cast for the Democratic runner-up. So, yes, that's right -- throughout the primaries, the candidate who lost the Democratic primary still received a lot more total support than the winner of the Republican primary. 
In these six states, in fact, the Democratic runners-up received more total votes than all of the Republican candidates combined (3,882,147 to 3,875,813). So what's a Republican campaign strategist to do? First, of course, you have to try to increase the size of that red portion in terms of absolute numbers. You have to try to increase Republican voter turnout by getting voters who lean your way more excited about your candidate. That's part of what it seems the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin as McCain's running mate was intended to do. For at least one block of GOP voters, I think it worked. Evangelical Republicans were, at best, tepidly supportive of John McCain. Some were openly hostile to him. Palin's Pentecostal roots and -- more importantly -- her credentials as a zealous abortion opponent helped to fire up evangelicals and to get them behind John McCain. Unfortunately, that doesn't change the dynamic reflected in the graphs above. The red portion of those graphs isn't just John McCain's supporters, but all of the Republican voters in those primaries -- including the Mike Huckabee-supporting evangelical voters now reclaimed by the selection of Sarah Palin. Firing up the base doesn't change the dynamic reflected in those graphs because what they show is the gap between the size of the Republican base and the size of the Democratic base. Just consider the example of Ohio. More than 600,000 new voters registered in Ohio to participate in the primary elections. As the graph above shows, these new voters were overwhelmingly Democratic. It's as though the entire population of Vermont just moved to Cleveland. Firing up the Huckabee faction by choosing Palin doesn't do anything to change that, which brings us to Strategy No. 2. The next hope for Republican strategists was that the Democratic primaries would leave their opponents so fractured and divided that some of the blue portion of the graphs above would turn red. Sure, it's devastating for the GOP to contemplate that the Democratic runners-up still outpolled the combined total of the entire Republican field, but what if the supporters of those runners-up could be peeled away and added to that Republican total? This isn't a terribly plausible scenario, once you start to think about it a bit. The Democratic primaries were hard-fought, but nowhere near contentious enough to cause core members of the Democratic constituency to turn away from all of the issues they care about and support the other side out of spite. The idea here, essentially, is to fire up the other side's base in the hopes that they will then switch sides. Not a promising idea. But Republicans gave it their best try. They spent months pushing the narrative that huge numbers of disaffected Clinton supporters were somehow up for grabs. This culminated in a weird ritual interview conducted dozens of times over at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The reporters all set out to find some of these disaffected Clinton supporters and, failing to do so, they wound up interviewing people who had voted for Hillary in the primaries but who were now, like Clinton herself, squarely backing Obama. "Still though," the reporters said, "in theory, you must agree that it's possible that somewhere there might be Clinton supporters who are so angry after the primaries that they're now willing to vote for a candidate who disagrees with them on every issue just for, like, revenge or something." "I guess, in theory," the interviewees all conceded. "It's possible that such people might exist. I just haven't met any myself." Dozens of interviews like that in every newspaper and on every cable news program. The idea of peeling away Clinton supporters was thus a runaway success as a media meme and a talking point for pundits. As an electoral strategy, though, it turned out to be a miserable failure. The last gasp of that strategy was also apparently the idea that the Palin selection would help to win over those who had voted for Clinton in the Democratic primaries. The idea seemed to be that, you know, they're both, um, women? In that regard, the Palin pick was a disaster. It turns out that Clinton supporters weren't charmed by the insulting insinuation that their candidate had nothing to offer beyond her gender. And the contrast between the two women's respective qualifications and talents did not flatter the McCain ticket. So with the failure of strategies No. 1 and No. 2 to change the lopsided dynamic seen in those graphs above, what's left for the GOP? Well, they could try to win voters on the merits of their policy positions, but such an attempt doesn't seem to have occurred to them. It's just not the way Republicans run nowadays. "Who do I look like," they ask, "Al Gore?" And anyway, let's give the voters some credit -- the graphs above likely reflect that voters have already evaluated the policy positions of the two parties and their preference, in that regard, seems to be clear. So what else is there? Not much. There's personal biography and character. Unfortunately the graphs above already account for that as well. When this long, long campaign started, voters generally regarded John McCain as an impressive guy, but they still weren't going to vote for him. So that leaves the GOP strategists, apparently, with race-baiting and dirty tricks. And that is where we find ourselves today. Thus, in the midst of an unprecedented and vastly consequential global financial crisis, we have witnessed a Republican campaign dominated by conspiracy theories about 1960s radicals and the flagrant racism of the cyclical ACORN two-step. Ugly, low, dishonest and dishonorable. And probably also counter-productive. The only other arrow that GOP strategists seem to have in their quiver is litigation. The Ohio GOP has now sued to force a massive re-verification of all 600,000 of those new voters in the Buckeye State. The goal here seems to be to intimidate and/or burden those new voters to keep them away from the polls. If you can't win by a straight up vote, then litigate and disenfranchise. That sleazy strategy worked in Florida in 2000, but it's a trick play and those become less effective the more you rely on them. In 2000, with Nader in the mix, Florida was close enough to swing by purging 40,000 voters whose names were the same as those of felons. The army of obstructionist GOP lawyers working in Ohio in 2008 faces a much more difficult task. Dirty tricks might help to whittle down the blue side in those graphs above, but -- barring something even more egregious and illegal -- the gap is simply too large to litigate away. I've been watching the unraveling of John McCain for the past several months with some fascination. His campaign has worked its way through the list of strategies above, using up ever more of their candidate's credibility until the account was finally overdrawn. What scares me now is this: I don't think they're done yet. Just because I can't imagine how McCain and his surrogates could sink any deeper into the sleaze and the race-baiting muck doesn't mean that his strategists -- odious professional liars like Steve Schmidt and Rick Davis -- have reached the limits of their imagination. Each time one of their previous strategies has failed to gain traction, they have responded as though it would have worked had it only been more dishonest and just a bit sleazier. So they roll out the next plan and drag their campaign even lower and John McCain approves of the newest ugly message and Sarah Palin enthusiastically embraces the next inflammatory lie and Obama's lead in the polls gets even bigger. John McCain, right now, is hoping that Barack Obama will make some massive mistake in tonight's debate -- an epic gaffe for the ages. I don't expect that to happen. McCain's next best hope -- and I mean for his soul, not for his electoral prospects -- is to have someone like Bob Dole sit him down and explain what's at stake in the three weeks he has left. Bob Dole should explain to McCain that even though Bob Dole never got to be president, Bob Dole is OK with that, because people remember Bob Dole as an honorable man and not as a lying, dishonorable, race-baiting windsock willing to say or do anything in pursuit of his ambition for power.
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