| Show The Power of Two Myths Harold Special to The Washington PostAs Post PostAs PostAs As its days dwindle down to a precious few the McCain campaign is giving new life to old myths In an attempt to suppress minority voting it has conjured up the specter of voter fraud though there is no evidence that voter fraud exists Even more impressive is its attempt to resurrect the welfare queens against whom Ronald Reagan used to fulminate though the stories Reagan told about them had no basis in fact either Welfare was pretty much abolished in the mid of course but an increasingly desperate John McCain is transporting us back to the wedge issues of yesteryear To do so he is accusing Barack of bringing back the discarded policies of welfare by calling for fora a tax cut that will apply to all taxpayers including workers who pay payroll but not income taxes because their earnings are too low A tax break for the working poor janitors waitresses employees of Wal Mart Wal-Mart Mart and McDonalds McDonald's becomes in McCains McCain's telling a subsidy from all the Joe the Plumbers to undeserving people who live off the dole Back in Reagans Reagan's day the whole point of attacking welfare recipients of course was to rally susceptible white voters to the Republican column by stoking their animus at African Americans whom they wrongly believed comprised the majority of welfare recipients It enabled Reagan and his wing right-wing crew to pl play y the therace therace therace race card without actually having to make racially specific characterizations Which is precisely the tack McCain is taking as he makes a last-ditch last attempt to pull every possible vote out of Appalachian Ohio and Pennsylvania The other myth McCain is making much of these these days is that of voter fraud In state after state the number of newly registered Democrats dwarfs the number of newly registered Republicans a predictable development in ina a nation whose incumbent Republican president has hasan hasan hasan an approval rating you'd expect to see for strep throat For years the Republican response to the rising number of white non-white voters in particular has been If you cant can't win their vote suppress it So the GOP has propagated the myth that large numbers of people are voting who shouldn't be that voter registration groups such as ACORN which the Republican ticket regularly attacks are like the big- big city machines of yore casting ballots in the name of the dead and stealing elections Ferreting out these nefarious activities became a central focus of the Justice Department under John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales at the direction of the Bush White House The department instructed all US U.S. attorneys that the prosecution and conviction of voter-fraud voter perpetrators was in Gonzales' Gonzales words a top priority Extensive investigations were undertaken across the nation Yet by 2005 asArt as asArt asArt Art Levine reported in the American Prospect this April only two people had been charged with falsifying or fabricating voter registration forms and nobody had been charged with impersonating another voter But the current attacks on ACORN provide the pretext for attempts to turn black voters and college students away way from their polling pl places ces In Ohio the Republican war on voting has already begun Hamilton County that's Cincinnati prosecutor Joseph Deters who is also the southwest Ohio regional chair of the McCain campaign subpoenaed the records of new voters who have cast absentee ballots because he suspected their addresses might not comport to other public records A GOP fundraiser fundraiser fundraiser fund fund- raiser in the state is asking the Ohio Supreme Court to deny recent registrants the right to vote because their addresses on their registration tion forms don't dont match those on their drivers driver's licenses a discrepancy that suggests that the voters have moved or that the addresses were entered incorrectly by the registrars registrar's offices If you cant can't find the crime here youre you're not alone A number of the US attorneys fired by Gonzales got the ax for failing to uncover such crimes though they conducted reaching far-reaching investigations David Iglesias the former US U.S. attorney for New Mexico told Levine that voter fraud is like the parents use to scare their then children Its It's very frightening and it doesn't exist But its it's still a quite serviceable myth if Republicans can invoke it to block many thousands of new registrants from voting Its It's serviceable even if McCain is defeated as the right can then claim that the election was stolen and that Barack isn't a legitimate president On such racist garbage as African Americans voting fraudulently so they can collect welfare checks again is McCain staking his claim for the presidency |
