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Monday, October 13, 2008
Democrats’ tactics frighten
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Just as certain as the dog days of August or the arrival of September’s harvest moon, the staple of every election cycle arrives at our doorstep. It’s called: Scare the ignorant.
Frighten the fragile while concocting another fantasy for the conspiracy-minded that those mean old Republicans want to rob social security, spoil the rich and erect barriers to keep black voters, the most loyal of the Democratic constituencies, from the polling places.
This is why appeals to the inattentive are so effective. Just as the immigration fight was never about legal entry, the issue with voter identification is not suppression of legally-qualified voters. It’s suppression of fraudulent voting — as in illegal votes that steal the votes of those who play by society’s rules.
In 11 battleground states, the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now, or ACORN), an organization long associated with Barack Obama, is being investigated for fraudulent activities for submitting phony voter registration applications. The first 2,100 of 5,000 applications they submitted in the Indiana county where Gary is located were bogus. “All the signatures looked exactly the same,” said one election official. “Everything on the card filled out looks exactly the same.”
In the Indianapolis area, 105 percent of the adult population has been registered to vote.
Meanwhile here in Georgia, Secretary of State Karen Handel, a Republican, is being vilified by activist Democrats for her efforts to guarantee that the election is honest, that the people who vote are indeed legally eligible. It’s legal vs. illegal. It has nothing in the world to do with voter suppression — and, frankly, the partisans of the left know that.
The left always has wanted same-day registration and voting because it serves their political interest. The problem with running a bus down the street on Election Day is that you pick ineligible felons and those who have been too lazy to register and are, furthermore, too disengaged with the world beyond Jerry Springer to have a clue about the issues or the candidates.
If it’s possible just to round them up, hand them the voting card and drop them off at the polls, the left’s version of democracy would be a whole lot easier to effect.
The problem, however, is that a majority of Americans recognizes the perils of that approach.
Handel took a beating from Democratic partisans because she insisted in honoring the Voter ID law, just as she has taken a beating from some of them for her insistence on verifying the eligibility of submitted applications.
She was sued last week by a group seeking to halt the state’s efforts to verify the citizenship of registered voters when there’s a question — as, for example, a new citizen who previously was identified on driver’s license records as a non-citizen. It’s the routine of honest government. No hidden agendas. No conspiracies.
The suing group contended that efforts to verify the eligibility of those who previously had declared themselves not to be citizens required pre-clearance under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
“We didn’t come up with that on our own,” she said. It’s required under the Help Americans Vote Act. “It is federal law. I don’t think the Department of Justice gets to pre-clear Congress. We’re doing precisely what the federal law tells us to do.”
The reality is that there are groups, like ACORN, determined to gum up the works or to slip ineligibles past the verification process.
There’s a full-scale effort on to intimidate Handel by representing legitimate verification as suppression and by accusing her, in advance, of responsibility for any Election Day glitches if everybody who shows up is not voted, eligible or not.
She is not intimidated — nor should she be. For any election you want to have a safeguard in place, she says. Once upon a time, nobody would have disagreed with such a common-sense assertion.
Ah, but then, once upon a less-partisan time nobody would have disagreed with Voter ID, either.
But since the left’s effort to scare the old folks on Social Security is not around this cycle, it’s scaring minorities, trying to frighten them to the polls.
It’s not about voter suppression or Voter ID. It’s about voter turnout.
Until they get same-day registration and voting for all adults, fright is the way the left wins elections.
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My advice to McCain
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
John McCain starts the new week down in the polls and with a base that’s growing antsy about the mixed messages he’s sending voters.
His newly aggressive efforts to highlight Barack Obama’s association with Wiliam Ayers, the 60s radical is useful, but some Republicans are questioning whether such efforts turn off the Independents and moderate women who are needed to close the gap.
The Wall Street Journal has done a marvelous job in unraveling Obama’s promises on tax cuts. “There are several sleights of hand,” the newspaper reports, “butg the most creative is to redefine the meaning of ‘tax cut.”
What it amounts to is a huge new welfare program represented as tax cuts. Now, as the Tax Foundation reports, 44 percent of all filer, or 63 million, have no tax liability and under Obama’s tax proposals by 2011, that would grow by 10 million. The cost, meanwhile, would skyrocket from $647 billion to $1.054 trillion, according to researchers. Those filers get checks back. It’s a huge welfare program and is another of those creative ways that liberals grow government by hiding its expansion — or in the case of Obama, by misrepresenting it as tax breaks for the middle class.
My advice to McCain is to let Governor Palin take on Obama on the character issues. He should focus on educating Americans on the deceit in Obama’s tax proposals, the impact of his health care proposals and the contributions Obama’s party has made to the economic woes the country is facing.
That’s my advice. What’s yours?
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