Let me know who you are, and I’ll be sure to say hello on Tuesday. We’re really looking forward to seeing you!

Sunday 8:00-8:30 – National election preview broadcast; Swingstate-by-swingstate election preview broadcast

Tuesday 5:00-??? – LIVE ELECTION NIGHT COVERAGE

See you then!

The half-hour Obama infomercial (Obamamercial?) featured Obama’s always-brilliant speaking ability. As I said in the Twitter feed, Obama has a positively Reaganesque ability to address a giant crowd so that you believe he is talking to you directly.

The structure of the infomercial was to alternate the sometimes tragic personal stories of Americans – Americans from the swing states of Ohio and New Mexico, no less – with Obama’s specific policy proposals on taxes, energy, health care, and defense. It was a return to the theme of the Democratic Convention, and the message was clear – Obama wants you the voter to identify with the people you saw in his videos, and to know that he has clear solutions that apply to your situation.

The message was a bit jumbled – he jumped from a man in Ohio who had just lost his pension straight into energy policy. And I’d question the choice of set – it looked a bit too close to the Oval Office and might turn some voters off.

But overall, I think it was a great success for Obama. We’ll have to wait until about Friday to see whether it has an effect in the polls.

What does this mean for the election as a whole? Stevens;s name is still on the ballot for next Tuesday, but he now is very likely going to lose. That means that the Democrats’ baseline number of Senate seats sits at 58. If Al Franken wins the seat in Minnesota, where he is currently leading in the polls, that’s 59. The magic number is 60 – with 60 seats, the Democrats can operate a filibuster-proof Senate. Working with potential President Obama (at this point, Obama will win, barring unheard-of voter complacency or the biggest “October Surprise” in history), a filibuster-proof Senate could pass essentially any legislation they wanted. That prospect may excite or terrify you, depending on whether you are a Democrat or a Republican.

With 59 seats, the Democrats would have to win only one seat to reach the magic number of 60. In Senate contents in Georgia, Mississippi, and Kentucky, Republicans are leading by small marigns. If the Democrats can pull off an upset in any one of those seats, they will reach that magic number. We’ll keep a close eye on those three races.

“Liberals hate real Americans that work and accomplish and achieve and believe in God.”

Let’s try this again.  There is no qualifying adjective attached to the word “liberal;” therefore Rep. Hayes is referring to any and all liberals.  Presumably that’s the point, but bear with me.  Again, that’s any and all liberals.  I am a liberal.  I’m not sure what is meant by “real Americans,” but whoever they are, I don’t hate them.  I’d also like to return to my point from my previous post about Rep. Bachmann.  The only incontrovertible definitions of America involve geographic boundaries and The Constitution- both of which have historically been fluid, incidentally.  I live in America.  If it matters, I was born here and I’m a citizen.  I am real American then, because that’s the only thing that matters.  Everything else is up for grabs. So to spell it out plainly: I’m a real American, and I don’t hate myself.

I have nothing against people who work, or achieve, or accomplish, or all three.  I have no idea what he’s even talking about here.

Also, while my own religious feelings are somewhat mixed, I’ve got various friends who most definitely believe in G-d, in a variety of faiths (which I somehow doubt counts for Rep. Hayes, but that’s another matter) and I don’t hate them, either.  Hence the term “friends.”  Rep. Hayes is demonstrably wrong, and it doesn’t take a complex debate to prove it- all it takes is a dictionary.

George Orwell, who wrote the essay that gives name to this post and its predecessor, understood that to control language is to control reality.  Don’t let people like Hayes and Bachmann define broad words in their narrow contexts.  It’s the same thing as defining people in that narrow standard.  Whoever you are, whatever you think and believe in, you’re as much a real American, or a real member of a nationality/group/culture as the next person.  We all have a right to our points of view.  Different is not anti.

Twenty-five years later I see no one at the forefront of American politics with that kind of self-confidence. I see Palin, who tries to charm people as if they cannot see beyond that; I see Clinton , with her cold competence and suspicions of sexism. Thatcher was a different class; she outdid sexism fearlessly. Am I just imagining this? I know, Thatcher was politically…interesting.  But she had courage. I am not saying that these women don’t; but perhaps not quite enough of it. Perhaps they still allow too much discussion about the mere fact of being female.

All right, you can shout at me now about Thatcher.

And now the situation only seems more cemented. Obama has just opened up his widest lead so far. However, it ain’t over til it’s over, and deeply odd things have been known to happen in elections. Even apart from some random event, gaps in the polls have historically tightened as the election gets closer, and with Obama, there is some worry about the “Bradley Effect.”

Leaving aside the why of the matter though- as there is not, as of yet, any actual matter- what would a House-chosen president mean for the country? The track record for such a thing is both short and bad: Rutherford B. Hayes , the only president in American history to be chosen out of an electoral college tie, spent four years being referred to as “Rutherfraud.” Part of the reason for this is that Hayes lost the popular vote by a margin of 250,000. Even with today’s population, that’s no small margin. And the same type of discrepency was fuel for Democratic and left-wing (yes, I continue to consider those two different things) discontent with Bush in 2000 (leaving the Florida debacle out of this as another subject entirely, although Hayes’s victory also turned on a partisan Supreme Court justice).

In fact, it’s Bush’s presidency that would push a House election from political curiosity to nightmare. If there’s one thing all sides can agree on, it’s that he’s been divisive. As far as I can recall, no one painted portraits of Reagan piously on his knees in a church, looking up into a shaft of light (no, seriously), and no one called for Bill Clinton to be tried as a war criminal. And of course, as I mentioned above, all that was after he got his first term on an election that a lot of people don’t think he actually won in the first place, and that was indisputably against the popular vote. Things have just now started to calm down, sort of. In terms of what’s passed for political discourse these last eight years, primarily consisting of conservatives declaring themselves the one true America and liberals declaring Bush an inhuman monster, things have been downright polite. Oh sure, Palin’s trying to impart a little last minute us-vs.-them flavor to the proceedings, but the woman’s so far out of her depth that she doesn’t even realize she’s in a pool. Compared to the machinations of Rove and Cheney, she might as well be wearing a ball gag, as in fact I’m sure she is somewhere in heavily doctored photos on the internet.

The point being, disagreement over issues was climbing towards the kind of religious furor that includes burning at the stake, but it’s leveled off as Bush’s popularity has taken after Skylab’s trajectory. The fever has broken, and we can begin to heal for real- but it’s not going to happen if the election goes into the house. Congressmen are politicians, politicians belong to parties, and whoever they choose will look about as legit to our divided nation as a three dollar bill. Sure they do this kind of thing in other countries all the time, but that’s for coalition governments in places where there are significantly more than the two parties that give America its winner-take-all core political philosophy. And even then, the most popular party in the election gets the most clout.

Look, things aren’t going to heal overnight, and no matter who wins, it’ll leave a lot of people disappointed. But it’ll help things a lot if we have a real choice in the matter.