Apparently, despite all the polls and indicators to the contrary, Robert Gibbs believes that the Democrats will retain control of the House of Representatives. He thinks that Barack Obama’s stumping is their secret weapon. This prompted one commentator this week to ask, “What universe does Robert Gibbs inhabit?”
I have to admit that this question led me into what Thomas Hobbes would have called “a wicked train of thought.” What if Robert Gibbs wasn’t just having a bout of mental flatulence? The fact that you disagree with someone, even the fact that you believe he is part of a faction out to destroy America’s liberty, shouldn’t blind you to the possibility that he is well aware of what is obvious to everyone else. So instead of assuming that Gibbs is a delusional idiot, what if we ask ourselves the question that comes to mind if we assume that he’s not – does he know something we don’t?
Just as there are a lot of polls and surveys that suggest the Democrats are going to take a sound drubbing on Nov. 2, there have also been a lot of articles sounding the alarm about the possibility of massive cheating by those same Democrats throughout the country. Can we assume that the people who have brought Chicago-style politics onto the national scene in so many other ways have simply left behind its most infamous characteristic, which is of course a penchant for stealing elections? Did Robert Gibbs just trip down the rabbit hole, or was he quietly signaling to those in the know that all is never lost when the dead can vote and the living never move away? Was he “jus’ trippin’,” as the flower children used to say, or was he seeing an omen in anomalies like the come-from-nowhere victory of Al Green in South Carolina’s Democratic primary? That was probably just a fluke, but if it was the dry run of some new technological voodoo for manipulating electoral outcomes … well, you do the math.
Assuming that Gibbs’ remark slipped out of some happy daydream, it would surely be a powerfully pleasant one for the folks in his position. Remember the famous photo of Harry Truman holding a newspaper with the headline announcing Republican Thomas E. Dewey’s victory in the election Truman had just won? If all the polls and prognostications prove wrong and the Democrats hold on to even a slim margin in the House, and if meanwhile their most famous endangered incumbents slip out of the noose, the GOP’s political Shangri-La will suddenly morph into joyless Mudville. Meanwhile, Obama will go from the maligned status of incompetent FDR wannabe to become the beneficiary of a new tidal wave of hero worship as ‘Give ’em hell Barry,” the man who took Harry Truman’s unbeatable heart and put legs on an openly socialist 21st-century version of FDR’s New Deal.
Of course, it’s just a daydream, right? To be sure, if participants in the tea-party movement are luckless enough to get trapped in it, they will wake up in a nightmare world, scapegoated as the fanatical stumblebums who derailed the GOP’s high hopes. They will watch in agony as Obama’s renewed status as a political idol impels the GOP’s feckless leadership into an orgy of bipartisan surrender that seals America’s liberty into the tomb of socialistic government domination. I’m sure the cryptosocialist GOP leadership would cry huge crocodile tears of remorse as they complete the sacrifice of their supposed free-enterprise and constitutional principles, but in the background would be those elite forces that manipulate the sham party system, glowing with satisfaction as the grass-roots movement that might have revived the sovereignty of the American people dissolves and scatters, demoralized.
If this daydream came to pass, Robert Gibbs would exchange his Mad Hatter outfit for the mantle of 21st-century Oracle. He and all his master’s minions would benefit from an aura of invincibility that would render their every scheme and project, however Green or Red, impervious to opposition. The only thing more decisive than a massive victory is the awe and wonder inspired by a breathtakingly unexpected one. Stupefied (as Machiavelli might say) by the sudden reversal, opposition to Obama’s agenda would evaporate. America would no longer teeter on the brink of outright socialist tyranny. We would plunge into the abyss.
I’m not suggesting that anyone climb aboard this wicked train of thought. But the possibility that it’s lurking out there somewhere, on one of the sidings of history, ought to prompt people to speak more openly and prepare more carefully to thwart, if that’s possible, the schemes of Chicago-style electoral fraud that are its most plausible feature. It’s sad but true that to thwart a criminal enterprise you must explore the improbable byways haunted by those capable of conceiving them. After all, the difference between a daydream and a plan is just a matter of commitment. Some people have wicked trains of thought. Others decide to ride them into history. Those who can do neither, well, they just go along for the ride, one way or the other.
