If the Democrats pull this off and win the presidential election, the Republican "noise machine" will not simply give up and devote themselves to charity. They will need to undermine and delegitimize President Obama as much and as loudly as possible, non-stop, for the entirety of his term. Early predecessors of this strategy include claims that John Kennedy stole the 1960 election with Chicago Mayor Richard Daley's corrupt machine and reminding everyone that Bill Clinton didn't win a majority of the vote in 1992. But the 2008 version will be even nastier and so much more toxic! Thanks, then, to Roger Stone, old-school GOP Political Operative, for giving us a sneak preview of the complaints you'll be hearing until 2012:
Democratic voter fraud will be greater this year than in any Presidential election since Mayor Richard Daley stuffed the Chicago ballot boxes for JFK in 1960 while Lyndon Johnson had hundreds of thousands of Texas absentee ballots burned before they could be counted. ACORN, a left-wing activist group that supports Obama, is literally dragging homeless people, people from drug rehab centers, soup kitchens and women in domestic abuse shelters to the polling places for early voting. In Ohio any warm body can register and vote on the same day-an open invitation for voter fraud.
Yes, Voter Registration Drives are indicative of massive fraud! Homeless people may be humans but that doesn't mean they should be allowed to vote. Some of them might be immigrants or something! The conservative obsession with ACORN obsession has already crossed from the wingnuttier right-wing sites to the slightly less wingnutty right-wing sites and soon it'll be part of the almost-legitimate conversation. With FBI raids of ACORN offices already underway, the very name of the occasionally shady low-income housing community organization will soon become shorthand for the voter fraud that stole the election for Obama. While Democrats complain of Diebold and voter suppression, Republicans have their terrifying visions of poor black homeless junkies dragged to polling places in exchange for needles. Republican state legislatures have been passing or trying to pass Voter ID laws for years now. But their campaigns are barely concealed rehashes of the Poll Tax. There's no epidemic of voter fraud, and, as Slate pointed out in 2006, where there is voter fraud it's the kind that isn't stopped by asking everyone to have a birth certificate and drivers' license. Regardless! It's an easy line for people shocked, shocked that 51% of the country likes Barack Obama. And so, just as for four tedious years liberals bitched about how Bush stole the election just because he lost the popular vote, conservatives have already pre-approved their anti-Obama argument. And more power to them! Because it worked so fucking well for us in 2004, right?