Riding the Whirlwind

I don’t know about you, but I feel like I’m just hanging on as these last few days of The Most Important Election in The History of the Universe reaches its frenetic conclusion.

(It is an important election, of course. But you know, they do say that about every election.)

Today we got our first robocall. In most states, these are recorded phone calls that generally are attack ads aimed at a candidate. In MN, you can’t do robocalls as such, you have to have a live person making the call.

So guess what they do. They hire someone to call you and read a script. The young lady who called me read her script at an almost inhumanly fast pace, in a monotone, never pausing for even a beat, obviously not want to be interrupted or questioned. I actually could not make sense of the blizzard of words that were spilling over the phone line, but I did catch a few, “Obama” and “taxes” and “spread the wealth” and “McCain/Palin.” Maybe they are trying for a subliminal thing. I did get the impression that it was against Obama. The second the reader was done with her script, she hung up. Classy!

All I can say is, I hope the Republican National Committee is spending a lot of money on this stuff, because I can’t imagine a much less productive approach.

I will say that the R’s and the D’s are spending money like drunken plumbers in these last days. Our commerical breaks are about 60 percent political ads, some of them VERY ugly. The stuff they’re throwing up at Franken is as nasty as anything I’ve ever seen, and the stuff against Coleman is not subtle either. I really understand why some are saying “a pox on both your houses.”

I spent some time listening to AM radio yesterday as well, and I’m guessing the National Right to Life has a huge ad account because about every other ad was from them. They’re not Obama fans. They’re also lying through their teeth, in case you had any doubts.

So, where do we stand. There’s talk of tightening polls, but most of them actually look pretty stable. Obama leads by 4-9 points. I don’t know if he’ll pull off N. Carolina or Indiana or Missouri, but it’s notable that McCain and Palin are hitting eleven states, most of them which went to Bush in 2004.

I remember 2004. John Kerry made a similar last-minute, multi-state dash. Minnesota, Wisconsin and other blue states were among his last rallies. We won’t be seeing Obama in those states this time. This election is being fought out in red states.