Hi, Everyone. Thanks for letting in a non-specialist. I appreciate Arianna's dauntless efforts--both their courage and their energy. She is an inspiration!

So, let's look at all the cards that the Republicans normally have in their electability hand--the race card, the fear card, the patriotism card, the money card, the morality card, the lying and cheating card, and the party loyalty card. In the last eight years, all of these have been more or less devalued, but the Republicans haven't got anything else. Given the present state of the economy and the past state of John McCain's morality, I think the two M cards are losers. All the Democrats have to do is tie McCain to the Bush economy over and over, and plant audience questions about McCain's history of womanizing.

The Republicans will certainly play the patriotism card--Hillary Clinton already showed that it can be effective when she spoke equivocally a couple of months ago about Barack Obama's religion and his upbringing. She also used the race card to good effect. But both the race card and the patriotism card are a little dangerous for the Republicans because Obama himself doesn't seem intimidated by their use. Casting doubt on an opponent's patriotism and arousing racial fears work as forms of bullying, but if the victim appears unbullied, such attacks fail with all but those voters who were already immune to his appeal.

Leaving aside the party loyalty card as an imponderable (as in, I simply can't imagine why anyone would support a Republican at this point), all the Republicans have are the lying and cheating card and the fear card.

In the election of 2000, the fear card could not be the card of choice because Americans were prosperous, mostly happy, and not too worried about much of anything, so the Republicans relied on lying about their positions and intentions and cheating by manipulating voter rolls, vote counts, and the Supreme Court. In subsequent elections, they've relied on panicking the populace AND on lying and cheating. It's not quite clear which was more effective, but I think we have to be prepared for them to use both. At the same time, both of those will be less effective than they have in the past. One of the beneficial effects of Obama's skill at community organizing and his grassroots popularity should be greater vigilance on the part of the average Obama voter, and a more systematic and aggressive resistance to standard Republican voter suppression tactics. If I were the Obama campaign, with all its financial and human resources, I would definitely deploy my voter suppression resisters early and often. At the same time, Obama needs to emphasize the negative impact of Karl Rove's attempts to politicize the Justice Department, and make sure that that scandal is never far from the voters' minds.

The fear card, too, is less effective. In fact, most Americans are accustomed to the fears that the Republicans have used in the past. The effect of not catching Osama Bin Laden has been to make him seem not very important. The effect of screwing up the Iraq War has been that the Republicans can only bring it up as their failure. The fact that our current recession is a top-down example of the results of corruption in the banking and managing class means that they have to treat those fears gingerly, too. Exploiting fear of gay marriage has not worked, while exploiting fear of immigrants has only worked intermittently. If exploiting those particular fears had worked, then Huckabee or Tancredo would be our candidate, not McCain.

It seems to me that the only option the Republicans have at this point is to manufacture a fear in the general population by engineering some sort of attack on American interests somewhere. But the scandal of the Iraq war and the constant lying about the Surge has inured voters to distant attacks on Americans and American interests. So, would they really engineer an attack on American soil in order to win the election? Some people I know say, "You bet they would", but I am not so sure. Karl Rove and Dick Cheney might have, but their ability to do so depended on the secrecy with which they wielded power. I think that secrecy is in tatters at this point, so who are the masterminds now? Who is the Republican these days who is as reptilian and ethics-free as the two of them? I don't know. Maybe some of you readers have an idea.

I don't think the dangers from the Republicans and the right wing are general. I think they are specific--traceable to particular men and particular tactics. George W. Bush, as a bonafide sociopathic evangelical corporate warmonger, combined all the worst aspects of Republicanism in his own person. He was one of a kind, as the Republican nominating process has shown. McCain is a more contradictory and divisive figure. If I were the Democrats, I would start right now simply broadcasting every misstatemant, every lie, every foolish idea, and every embarrassing assertion McCain has come up with in the last eight years. The record is there; let's show it. I would also come up with an enemies' list--who is the most likely new Rove? And then I would watch that person, or those people, constantly. The last four elections have shown that Republican minions are always looking for a way to cheat. We have to be prepared for that.