Anything For A Vote 2012 style

It’s been four years since I published the first edition of Anything For A Vote: Dirty Tricks, Cheap Shots and October Surprises in U.S. Presidential Campaigns. Since then we’ve had the Great Recession, the rise of the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street movements, the Arab Spring, ebooks, Twitter, fracking and Lady Gaga, not necessarily in that order. But the more things change, the more they stay the same, at least when it comes to dirty tricks in presidential contests. The run-up to 2012 has been a lot like that of 2008, only the positions of the respective parties are reversed. Four years ago, John McCain was all but anointed the Republican candidate while Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton fought it out in a bruising primary.
Now the Democratic incumbent Barack Obama has kept out of the fray, while Republican wannabes have clashed for months, trying to tear each other down, bringing to mind Scott Fitzgerald’s famous maxim about Ernest Hemingway: “Ernest is always willing to give a helping hand to the man one rung above him on the ladder.”
Quirk Books, my publisher, is now bringing out my revised and updated e-edition of Anything For A Vote, including a chapter on the historic election of 2008, so I thought it might be time to add a few comments to kick off this grand election year. We’re going to see fireworks, dirty tricks-wise, no doubt about it. How could it be otherwise? The economy is in the tank, approval-ratings for our elected representatives are at an all-time low—only nine percent of Americans are happy with Congress, and one has to wonder if those “nine-percenters” have all their marbles. And President Obama—the 2008 candidate of “hope” and “change”—had better hope for a serious change in 2012, since his approval ratings are south of 50 percent. No American president has ever been re-elected during an economic downturn of such dimensions. However, he does face a divided GOP, which is having a hard time rallying behind their most viable candidate. Dirty tricks always get worse when political powerhouses clash during tough times.
Thus both sides will mount serious attacks. Obama will be called a foreign-born socialist and a weakling; Gingrich will be a serial adulterer and whacko; Romney will be John Kerry-ized as a “flip-flopper,” not to mention an ultra-capitalist who guts companies for profit.
Although we didn’t see the level of voter disenfranchisement I warned of back in 2008, I fear this will be an issue in 2012. At the behest of Republican legislators and chief executives, numerous states have already passed laws making it more difficult for people to exercise their right to vote, for instance by requiring driver’s licenses or government id cards as identification. It’s difficult enough to get Americans to turn out to vote—although 61.7 percent of those eligible actually turned out in 2008, the highest percentage since the Goldwater-Johnson slugfest of 1964—so such tactics often make all but the most determined citizens turn wearily back home.
But I’ll be keeping on eye on all of it this year. You can follow me on Twitter: @josephcummins or check out my blog right here.