Maybe the Democrats don’t want to win

With Barack Obama–who promises at least some change–and Hillary Clinton–who promises to uphold the status quodueling for the Democratic faction nomination, Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman explain how the recent Supreme Court decision upholding an Indiana state law requiring photo identification at the polling place will disenfranchise “between 10% and 13% of eligible voters, . . . disproportionately minorities and poor.”

Fitrakis and Wasserman also point to Democratic faction inaction on voting irregularities:

Though the Kerry Campaign solicited millions of dollars to “protect the vote” in 2004, it has not supported independent research into that election’s irregularities. In the King-Lincoln Civil Rights lawsuit, in which we are attorney and plaintiff, 56 of Ohio’s 88 counties destroyed ballot materials, in direct violation of federal law. There has been no official legal follow-up on this case, no major media investigation, and no support from the Democratic Party either to investigate what happened in Ohio 2004, or to make sure it doesn’t happen again in 2008. The issue has yet to be seriously raised by the major Democratic candidates despite the fact that it could render their campaigns moot.

The Kerry-Edwards platform in 2004 was scarcely distinguishable from Republican faction positions. The mainstream Democrats elected to power in 2006 have done little to fulfill their election mandate to get the United States out of Iraq, have done little to reverse the Bush administration encroachment of civil liberties, and, as if this was a surprise, have done nothing to retard the incestuous relationship between corporations and government. And now the great progressive hope repudiates his former pastor for calling it like it is.

Jeremiah [Wright], he’s a pastor, and as a pastor you have to see things as they are. Politicians see things as they want them to be. –Rev. William Revely, Holy Hope Heritage Church

In the coming election, we will have a choice between war criminals who lust after the power the Bush administration has conveniently accumulated in the White House. None of them promise to get us out of Iraq, and I have little faith that any of them will restore the Constitution. With a failing economy, soaring food and oil prices, declining home values, a rising number of foreclosures, and a weak job market, this election would be the Democrats’ to lose, even if not for an unpopular war and a shameful Bush administration record of torture and other crimes against humanity. But the Democrats seem not to want to win.

I might be able to vote for Barack Obama this November, if he doesn’t continue to sound too much like Malcolm X’s “house negro.” I could never vote for war criminals like Senators Clinton and McCain who have repeatedly supported the Bush administration in a phony “war on terror.” But as of now, I just might write in Gloria La Riva.

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