There have been many candidates for the "lowest moment" of this low, low, political campaign. Libby Dole's "Godless" ad is one, and Michele Bachmann's McCarthyesque "anti-American" rant is another. One of my personal favorites was when the McCain campaign bought the rights to the domain name VoteForTheMILF.com, and redirected clicks on it to the main John McCain website, where it ran a video of Sarah Palin. (The URL has since been changed to redirect to Google, but doesn't it just *scream* what they really thought of her?)
But my candidate for the lowest moment of the campaign, by far, is the use of one word, thrown out as an epithet, and as a label to be attached to Barack Obama: UNELECTABLE In my opinion, this word captures the nature of this epic campaign better than any other, because it captures the mindset of the two warring sets of energies better than any other. The people who called Barack Obama "unelectable" are OLD. They are tired, they are devoid of life force, and they honestly don't see any other solution to the problems of the world than the ones they have been trying for decades now. And, worst of all, they are so devoid of HOPE that they react to the presence of hope in others by trying to demonize it, as if hope were a bad thing. THAT is the mindset that hopefully will go down in flames tomorrow. And about bloody time, too. You need go no further than the two slogans of the two main political parties to see the difference between the "old and in the way" mindset that will exiting the stage and the one that will be entering, stage left. One party aligned itself with the arrogant, shortsighted, and jingoistic "Country First." They actually *like* the fact that the United States of America is the most feared and despised and distrusted nation on the planet. The other party swung behind a truth so simple that it inspired hatred and jeers from those so divorced from the notion of truth that they saw it as simplistic: "Yes we can." Well, the polls seem to indicate that Yes, we really can. The polls suggest that those who posed as "pundits" and claimed to be speaking from a platform of greater and more meaningful insight when pinning the U-word label to Barack Obama were, in a W-word, WRONG. Not only that, by using that word, they revealed the poverty of their own lives, and their own view of what life can be. They had lost hope so completely that they not only pooh- poohed the idea of bucking the status quo, they declared anyone who tried "unelectable." Well, we'll see, won't we? If, Wednesday morning, we find that these sad, hopeless fucks were right and that -- due to vote fraud and voter disenfranchisement -- Barack Obama really IS unelectable, I hope that another U-word will come into play: UNENDURABLE I hope that if that happens, those of us who are NOT with- out hope will rise up and burn the motherfuckin' country to the ground. It'll deserve it, and out of its ashes will rise a country that still believes that Yes, we CAN change. If things go as expected, then the real work is only start- ing, for Obama and for those of us he inspired. And the ones who reacted to someone who could still inspire (when their candidate could not) by screaming "Unelectable?" Well, frankly, fuck 'em. Let them crawl back into the fear- fenced hidey-holes they stuck their No-we-can't-change-and- anyone-who-claims-we-can-is-unelectable heads out of. Fuck 'em because some of us still have the ability to react to inspiration by becoming inspired, not fearful. We see the cry of "Yes we can" as a *reminder*, and a wake-up call, not as something to mock and be afraid of. And we're ready to start on Day One of a new, hopeful era of American history by pitching in to change things. Yes we can. Yes, we motherfuckin' can.
