Four days to go. Do you find yourself watching your candidate on TV and saying. “I wish he had said that in the debates!” or “Why couldn’t he have displayed that intensity three months ago”? Candidates and their supporters are finally saying some things “better late than never.”

And some are saying things about saying things that maybe they shouldn’t be saying. Or maybe it’s good they ARE saying certain things; that is, maybe we’re hearing things just in time.

On Halloween – appropriately – Barack Obama figuratively jumped out from behind a bush (no pun intended) and yelled Boo to voters. In Columbia, Missouri, he warned that the last four days of the campaign would be filled with hate, fear, and threats… from the Republicans. Just like they’ve been doing all along, he said. There would be attempts to keep voters from the polls… by the Republicans. (Big jokes from little ACORNS grow.) So forth and so on… but, understand, Obama will be there to protect us.

But saying these things do not make them true; or, to the real extent that all politics has become dirty, to tip O’Neill on his head, Obama’s portrayal of his campaign, the dirtiest in history, as the most innocent and cleanest will not make it so.

But with herd-instinct voters in the Media Age, you CAN put a Halloween mask on a pig and scare people.

One of the despicable tactics of the Obama campaign has been to play the race card. Actually, the campaign has dealt the race DECK. Did you notice that the outrageous racism of “Reverend” Wright, aired so early in the campaign, effectively erased a depiction of Obama himself as a Black Radical?

Then Obama said in many speeches that “they” (Republicans and conservatives) will tell “you” (susceptible voters) that “he” (Obama), “he’s different, he has a funny name, he… looks different.” Which is the same thing as accusing his opponents of stopping just short of the N-word and organizing lynching bees.

Notice that in this long campaign, Hillary and McCain were accused of being bigots, but the only SAYING of racist words were by people like Obama and Wright; the only bigoted words SAID were by Obama and his surrogates.

In the third presidential debate, a similar Big Lie was attempted. Obama claimed that at Sarah Palin appearances angry crowds were yelling, “Kill him!” at the mention of Obama’s name. But the Secret Service, a constant presence with the campaigns, denied they ever witnessed such a thing. The FBI investigated; the same thing – no evidence. No crowd members or reporters, even that reliably hostile press entourage, could attest to a single such imprecation.

But – having raised his libel from McCain as an individual to voters in general – Obama’s “saying” such trashy fabrications had the usual, slick success.

The latest bit of scabrous-saying from Obama surrogates and supporters comes from a doyen of American letters, the feminist icon Erica Jong. In Rome at the moment, she was interviewed by the newspaper Coriere della Serra on October 29.

Stick with my translation (the entire interview is here: << http://archiviostorico.corriere.it/2008/ottobre/29/Follett_Jane_Fonda_liberal_americani_co_9_081029030.shtml >> ) but here is what a Pulitzer Prize winning author, an oft-displayed supporter of Obama, said:

“… liberal Americans have anxiety about Obama.” The article quotes her feeling that there will civil war in the US if Obama were to lose. “There are voting booths that cast your vote for McCain when you pull the Obama lever.… the Republicans have already perpetrated swindles.”

She continued: “…my generation has seen, first-person, the murders of JFK, his brother Robert, Martin Luther King. Squads, armed with Kalashnikovs [machine guns] will also kill the Obama Dream.”

She asserts she is not alone in such assurances: writer “Naomi Wolf calls me every day in order to see if my mood is any blacker. Yesterday Jane Fonda sent me an e-mail” about her stress and back pains caused by anxiety of what will happen in the wake of an Obama loss. “My back also spasms a lot,” Jong said, “making me take Valium. This is what they [the Republicans] have caused….”

She claims “if Obama loses, the second American civil war will erupt. There will be the blood in the streets, believe me. … Bush has recalled from Iraq a contingent of soldiers who under the command of Dick Cheney will be employed in the streets against American citizens.”

The Italian reporter calls Jong’s analysis “apocalyptic.” But the American authoress continued: “Jewish intellectuals like me are not astonished, after eight years of Bush, as Naomi Wolf wrote in ‘The End of America,’ because the United States has been transformed into a police state -- from the torture of… journalists to the Patriot Act.”

So say Obama surrogates among the intelligentsia and overseas (is it any wonder that polls say Obama would carry European electorates?) Does Obama ever distance himself from such lunacy? Of course not. In his semantic paradigm, rather an existential exercise, you see, saying such things makes them perforce true. His absurd claims to ignorance of Jeremiah Wright’s racism and treasonous charges neutralized their significance. What Americans should be asking is” “Even if you never knew this guy whom you quoted for your autobiography’s title, why weren’t you outraged when you DID learn about it?”

Finally, let’s consider the threats made by Obama supporters like the celebrated writer Erica Jong. If her candidate loses, there will be civil war, blood in the streets. Indeed we have heard about big-city police departments, and inner-city officials, already scheduling extra security on the streets for election night.

What Erica Jong said, oh my. I have to disagree. I don’t think there will be rioting in the streets if Obama loses. You see, she says it as a threat (besides, if she incites to riot she will be safe in Rome or Israel or Beverly Hills).

What I foresee – and I pray and I keep hope alive that I am wrong – is that if Obama loses, the inner cities will riot. If Obama wins, the inner cities will riot. This happens when basketball teams lose and win; why not this presidential candidate?

This is what democracy in America has come to: lies, threats, and dangerous nonsense. Say it ain’t so.

– 30 – 

Rick Marschall has been called by Bostonia Magazine "perhaps America's foremost authority on popular culture.” He is the Managing Editor of Rare Jewel Magazine, the Christian journal of politics and culture; and founding and Contributing Editor of Hogan's Alley, Journal of the Cartoon Arts. The author/editor of 62 books, he has been a political cartoonist, columnist, syndicate editor, publisher, and lecturer. His wide experience includes Editor at Marvel Comics, writer for Disney Comics, consultant to the US Postal Service, and lecturer for the US Information Service of the State Department. He has been on the faculties of the School of Visual Arts, Rutgers University, Philadelphia College of Art (now University of the Arts), and the Summer Institute for the Gifted at Bryn Mawr University.