Let us now turn to our NY Times op ed pages to audience Frank Rich's The Terrorist Barack Hussein Obama
The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder.
A Reader comment
Vote suppression takes many forms. It is not just about ballot tricks or under counting the vote, although those things have been part of it.
Making the election about personalities is a tactic of vote suppression. Attack ads and Swift Boating are about vote suppression. Tactics that turn off voter enthusiasm are tactics of vote suppression.
The Brennan Center for Justice is fighting to limit the vote suppression that will result from the mis-named Help America Vote Act of 2002. The Brennan Center lists its goals as: expand the franchise, assure that all those eligible can vote, and assure every vote cast is accurately recorded and counted. It is telling that a University program staffed with volunteers must undertake this effort in the face of conservative agitation about ineligible voters. Claiming high ground on ineligible voters is simply a way of putting a pretty face on vote suppression.
Vote suppression is the whole point of racial politics. Racial politics kept slavery alive until Lincoln, Jim Crow alive until Martin Luther King, Jr, and now it is being used to suppress support for Barack Obama by emphasizing tangental personal issues that give cover for those whose conscious or unconscious motivation is race driven.
The phenomenon of Sarah Palin reminds us of why liberalism is a philosophy of limited government. Liberty, the basis of liberalism, requires that government must not be used as a vehicle for personal power or wealth. That is why the Bush years, and histories of favoritism given to or purchased by the wealthy elite, and Palins religiosity, and Troopergate, and the McCain-Palin rallies scare liberals and progressives alike.
Palin fear may motivate some of us, but her campaigning reduces politics to a level that invites cynicism and failure to participate. We must reject this play for vote suppression.
We must overcome our righteous cynicism and the internal and external barriers and join together to exercise the power of the vote to change our government and the disastrous course it has taken.
We are the majority. We can take back this country if we stick together.
-- dairubo, minneapolis
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