Printable Version
Tell a friend
Letter from a Former Dem. Speech Writer
Here's a letter from William J. Connell, top aide to Hubert Humphrey for twenty plus years, to his daughter, a dear friend of mine.
I have been a
bit obsessed about this election, shall we
say? But with good reason.
I believe it
much the most important
election since 1932 when the Democrats came in
at the very bottom of
the Great Depression, to sweep away the
old economic and political
order and make fundamental changes in the way
we govern and
specifically the way we treat our
downtrodden, our young, our sick and
our old, and, indeed, our entire working
class, to re-set the nation's
priorities, and to resume the great quest for
equal justice and
opportunity for all and not just for
the tiny moneyed class.
We have nearly
come full circle since
I was a small boy who looked down from the
second story of a Balboa
Park building in San Diego and watched the
great FDR sitting jauntily
in the back of a big convertible riding right
down the boulevard below
me.
Deja vu!
Here we have
seen once again the same
catastrophic failure of the wealthy and
privileged who had run the
country into ruin with their greed and
profligacy, and again we are
fortunate (some would say blessed) that at
just the right time a
leader has emerged from nowhere
-- something that no one two years ago
could ever have conceived of -- a young,
vigorous and good-hearted man
with the will and the eloquence and intellect,
and above all both
common sense and broad vision, to
lead this nation back out of the
shambles that the great corporations and
financiers and the Republican
puppets they put into office have made of
this country.
What a
challenge! What an opportunity
to set this great ship back on course and get
it moving again, to again
make government the servant of the broad mass
of our people, and not
the instrument of the super-rich to create and
entrench a permanent
oligarchy.
Hubert
Humphrey would have loved to see
this.
Love, Dad
I believe that nothing will change
in
the next 12 days, and that Obama will have a
great victory, very
possibly carrying in with him a
filibuster-proof Senate and the means
to break the Congressional
gridlock.
I am shortly
going to send around a
little chart of the poll closing times on
election night, with the
entire layout of what is the probable course of
election night -- that
is the capture by Obama
before five p.m. Pacific ST of the first
"Red"
state that will tell us that he has won the
night -- which could be any
of four states that report early:
Virginia or Ohio or North Carolina
or
Florida, while the only Kerry 2004 state that
McCain has chosen to
concentrate on to try to take away from Obama,
Pennsylvania, will be
reporting at the same time that it is again
going solidly Democratic.
At this point,
Obama holds a strong lead in all
the Kerry 2004 states, with 252 electoral
votes, and also holds such a
commanding lead in Iowa (which Bush carried)
that we can also count on
Iowa's 7 votes and know that Obama is
therefore just 10 votes short of
the 269 electoral college votes that would put
the election into the
Democratically-controlled House of
Representatives to decide.
I think the
odds are that he will
carry all four of those states, but the first
to be declared an Obama
win -- coupled with an Obama win in
Pennsylvania -- will tell us that
Obama has, indeed, won the
Presidency. Everything after that is
going
to be frosting on the cake, and it is just a
question of how big a lead
he runs up, how long his coattails are for the
House and Senate races,
and how strong the mandate the American people
will have given him.
If all the
polls are wrong, and there
is some kind of hidden anti-Black vote there
outside of the bigoted
stronghold of Appalachia, and Obama does not
carry even one of
those four critical Eastern states, then we
would be in for a long
evening while we wait for
Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico,
maybe even Montana and North Dakota to
come in, to find the last 10
votes needed to elect Obama.
That is the
worst case. I think it is
10 to 1 that Obama will put it away in the
first couple of hours after
the first of those four critical states closes
its polling places.
One of the
last pieces of the jigsaw
puzzle of this election campaign, and perhaps
the most important
speeches he will ever make in is life, will
be Obama's half-hour
prime-time national address on all networks
just four days, I think,
before the election. There he will put
the fire once again into the
younger voters they have so brilliantly drawn
in to register in those
critical states -- and overcome any "Bradley
effect" that may linger
in elderly Democrats and independents by
pouring into the polling
places to actually
vote.
Not long to wait,
now.