No Charmer Obama’s electoral psychodrama

On the eve of the US mid-term elections, ‘no drama Obama’ has turned into ‘no charmer Obama’. Even Democrats are aghast. No wonder, when last Monday Obama urged Hispanic voters to vote in this spirit:

‘We’re gonna punish our enemies and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us.’

So much for the ‘inclusive’ President who extends the hand of friendship to America’s mortal enemies. As Charles Krauthammer so bitingly observed:

This from a president who won’t even use ‘enemies’ to describe an Iranian regime that is helping kill U.S. soldiers in Afghanistan. This from a man who rose to prominence thunderously declaring that we were not blue states or red states, not black America or white America or Latino America – but the United States of America. This is how the great post-partisan, post-racial, New Politics presidency ends – not with a bang, not with a whimper, but with a desperate election-eve plea for ethnic retribution.

The authors of that other Washington Post article, Pat Caddell and Douglas Schoen, write:

No president has been so persistently personal in his attacks as Obama throughout the fall. He has regularly attacked his predecessor, the House minority leader and – directly from the stump – candidates running for offices below his own. He has criticized the American people suggesting that they are ‘reacting just to fear’ and faulted his own base for ‘sitting on their hands complaining.’ Obama is walking a knife’s edge.

Indeed. So as you may imagine, I was energised to receive this message from Team Obama a few hours ago (for some reason, I have been receiving a steady stream of inspirational messages from Team Obama ever since No Charmer’s accession to the White House):

Melanie —

A couple things are going to happen in the next half hour.
Partisan attack ads funded by big banks and big oil will air over and over on national cable television.
Outrageous right-wing smear messages will arrive in inboxes around the country.
And dozens of voters in your area will make a decision about whether they’ll be voting in this year’s election.
They’re people who might not currently be planning on making it to the polls in two days.
They’re people who might not know what’s at stake — who might not know the choice we all have in this election.
All of that is happening in the next 30 minutes. The only question is, will you be the person who changes the equation by picking up the phone and calling just 10 voters today?

Well indeed, that is the question.

Earlier this month, I was gratified to receive this from Team Obama:

Melanie —
I come into this election with clear eyes.
I am proud of all we have achieved together, but I am mindful of all that remains to be done.
I know some out there are frustrated by the pace of our progress. I want you to know I’m frustrated, too.
But with so much riding on the outcome of this election, I need everyone to get in this game. I need your time. I need your commitment. And I need your help to get your friends and neighbors involved.
If you bring in a new donor today, your $3 donation will become $6. And our Vote 2010 campaign will have twice the resources to make important investments like putting staff on the ground, providing materials for volunteers, and turning out millions of voters come Election Day.
Please donate $3 — and renew your commitment today.

While last month, Team Obama told me:

Your voice and commitment is what built this movement for change during President Obama’s campaign in 2008. And it is the reason we’ll be successful in making that vision a reality today.

Well of course, I was thrilled to hear about the part I had played. Fancy! You can see the evidence if you type ‘Obama’ into the search box at the side here. And back in August, Obama himself wrote to me thus:

Melanie —

Eighteen years ago, shortly after graduating from law school, I helped lead a voter registration campaign in Chicago that generated record turnout on Election Day.
That experience taught me one of the most important lessons I ever learned as a community organizer: When people promise that they’ll do something — like voting — they are far more likely to do it.
That’s why one key part of our Vote 2010 plan this year is to get folks like you from across the country to commit to vote, to make sure we get as many people as we can to cast their ballots this fall.

Ah yes, that voter registration campaign in Chicago. Project Vote, the most spectacularly successful voter registration drive ever. The one which was a front for a strategy advocated by two far-left radicals, Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, who sought to

‘hasten the fall of capitalism by overloading the government bureaucracy with a flood of impossible demands, thus pushing society into crisis and economic collapse’.

The one whose true aim was summarised by James Simpson at American Thinker as being

…to overwhelm, paralyze and discredit the voting system through fraud, protests, propaganda and vexatious litigation’.

The one which Alinskyite community organiser Obama ran in 1992 in Chicago with ACORN, the thugs whose speciality was intimidating voters and who have repeatedly been accused of fraud, illegality and corruption (and whom his campaign paid to register new voters during his run for the Presidency, something Obama denied but which, the Investor’s Business Daily has reported, it did; as Aaron Klein reports in his book The Manchurian President, his campaign similarly tried to deny ACORN’s involvement in the 1992 Chicago campaign, even though in 2007 Obama himself described ACORN as being ‘smack dab in the middle of it’ ).

Here’s a bit about the radical history of Project Vote. And here’s what Project Vote has been up to recently. And Obama is still boasting about it; and the sheep-like American media has never properly challenged him on it; and the American public has still not caught on, not even now, to just what it helped bring about on that fateful November day two years ago.