Well, it’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. You may have wondered why I ducked out of doing political columns, considering my rep and all that. It’s just that I wanted to see how the Demo situation would spin out. I knew a year and a half ago that this was going to be nasty. Hitlary’s from the Chicago area. Obama’s been in the city long enough to know how we operate. We play the game nasty here, and we play to win. It was going to be a bloodbath. That column I did a year and a half ago with Widro where he asked me to book the 2008 election as a wrestling event…that wasn’t hyperbole on my part. That’s exactly how I knew this would turn out.

And, guess what, I was right. I had McCain in a rollover on the GOP side (it was before Huckabee was in, so I had his last competitor being Romney; close enough for government work). And I had the Demo side as total mayhem and chaos, and the fallout still hasn’t settled. But most of the dust has. So it’s a good time to see where we are and where we’re going from here.

(Of course, I was absolutely right when I said in December 2000 that Dubbaya would be the worst thing to happen to this country since the White House was burned in 1814, and people claimed that I was whining and being hyperbolic and all that. And I still haven’t received one apology from people who went after me. I am truly a great prognosticator. You need to learn that and start listening to me for a change.)

Let’s get something out of the way first: I was for Hitlary. I voted for Hitlary in the primary. What’s going to follow, though, is not sour grapes. You know me better than that. Yeah, I’ll make fun of Tim Russert over his dead body, but I won’t do sour grapes. The reason I won’t fall into that trap is simple: I play the game in a pragmatic fashion. The reason I was for Hitlary was the same reason I was for John Kerry in 2004, even when he was at 9% in the polls: she had the best chance of winning in November. The only goal is to take the White House, period. Hitlary had the best chance of doing it. Now, we can only wonder.

So, how do I feel about our nominee? I’ll be honest: as a loyal Democrat who wants to win in November at all costs, I don’t like it, one damn bit. It’s a situation that I’m going to have to live with. But I don’t trust Barack Hussein Obama as far as I can throw his skinny ass. And I’ll explain why.

Obama as a nominee is giving off strong whiffs of 1972. George McGovern won the nomination by going outside the party apparatus, then had to make peace with them through compromise. Hitlary was the “establishment” candidate this year. Obama is going to have to do what McGovern ended up doing in order to make peace: dump the people who got him the nomination and bring on board the people who can get him the presidency. This is going to alienate the primary voters who went for him as an “agent of change”, people like JJ Botter who couldn’t imagine voting for a “standard” Demo candidate.

If he loses those people, who does that leave? The core Demo voting blocs. So let’s look at them. Blacks…okay, he’s got that sewn up pretty well, I think. But what about women and white blue-collar voters, the Soccer Moms and Reagan Democrats that he has to lure in in order to win? The Soccer Moms wanted Hitlary, as did another key voting bloc, older females. There was no sign of outreach to them during the primaries, since Obama conceded them to Hitlary. Now, if he makes moves, it’s going to appear to be pandering. He can’t win. He can’t even try.

As for the white blue-collar voters…it boils down to one word. That word is “n*gger”. I know these people. I grew up among them. I know how they think. And I said it a long time ago when I was involved in a debate with Grut over Hitlary: a woman in the White House is one thing, but a n*gger? We’re not a color-blind society. We’re not going to be one for a long time. Yes, I regret this. But it’s a fact. Just to show you an example: I was at my mother’s talking with her (hooray for the pharmaceuticals!) when ABC broke into General Hospital with a local emergency news break. It happened to be the story about R. Kelly being found Not Guilty of Kiddie Porn, obviously a big story here in Chicago (hence the news break). A look of disgust came over my mother’s face, and I knew exactly what she was thinking: how could a jury find a n*gger, even a rich n*gger, innocent? We all know they’re animals. He’s obviously guilty, and barely human. That is exactly how white blue-collar Democratic voters think when they see a black face. I lived through the acrimonious Chicago mayoral election when Bernard Epton got more votes than any Republican could ever dream of in Chicago because his opponent happened to have a large amount of melanin. Things haven’t changed that much.

Obama has to draw these people in, especially if he alienates his “youth vote” by playing compromise with the party, in order to win. He’s not going to be able to do that. He can call himself biracial all he wants (and he is), but too many voters out there operate on the “one drop of blood” principle. We can accept and root for a biracial individual being the best in history at what’s traditionally been a white man’s game, but Tiger Woods would have a tough time if he was running for the White House too. Actually, he’d have an easier time of it due to his hot, and very white, wife. I hope I live to see the day when Sam Woods, a half-white, quarter-black, quarter Asian female, will have no problems in running for the presidency due to ethnicity or gender. But 2008 is not that time.

And speaking of wives, there’s another problem. Michelle in 2008 is Hitlary in 1992, period. High-powered lawyer spouse with a big mouth who wears the pants in the family. You think that the GOP can’t wait for her to make a misstep, which she’s going to do (and has already done)? Being a black female does not provide Immunity To Criticism. We’ve moved that far up the ladder of equality. And she’s got a temper on her. If she gets criticized, she’s going after someone. She’s an impediment to the Obama campaign. She needs to be sent out of the country until the second week of November.

Then there’s the whole trust issue. The Rezko situation gets a lot of play around here, but very little on the national and international news. Trust me, there’s more to it than you read in the papers. The situation is a rumbling volcano beneath the Obama campaign, and they’re doing all they can to tamp it down. But it’s about to blow up anyway. Rod the Mod is going to be taken out of it, and as titular head of the Illinois Democrats, if he suffers damage, so does Obama. The damage will be direct and indirect, and it’s going to do more than singe his clothing. It will expose his sleazy side for all the world to see. And there’s not many places as tolerant as Chicago when it comes to accepting sleazy, amoral politicians. You want to totally burn the young “agent of change” voters? They’re going to get fried to a crisp by this Vesuvius of Sleaze. Disillusionment is a wonderful word, isn’t it?

Maybe the Rezko thing will shed light on the 2004 senatorial election. Here’s a little secret: Barack Obama should not be a senator right now. He was losing heavily in the polls to my beloved Seven of Nine’s nasty Republican ex-husband. That was until Jack Ryan tripped over his own dick and fell into the abyss. The GOP was forced to replace him with a non-entity, and this cleared the way for Obama. Who tipped off the papers to Ryan? Someone did. Ryan was the GOP’s Golden Boy, the chance to take the state for Dubbaya, which would have been critical If Illinois had gone for Dubbaya, there wouldn’t have been a need to commit fraud in Ohio to take the election. By all rights, if things had gone normally in Illinois, Obama would have been a lawyer who made a nice speech at the 2004 convention, and nothing else. He’s in the position he’s in today due to luck, lucky to be a senator and lucky to have had a press corps fixated on making Hitlary look as bad as possible. Luck has a tendency to run out. And with our luck, it runs out between now and November.

And that leads us to the final reason: the people around him. Yes, we’ve all heard about the problems he’s been having with his veep staff. But there’s a situation that you probably don’t know about that exemplifies the people of dubious character that he surrounds himself with. His organizer for South Texas is named Mark Rathbun. Mark Rathbun is better known as Marty Rathbun. At one point, Marty Rathbun was the number three man in the Church of Scientology. In 1993, Rathbun was in the room with David Miscavige when they made the dubious tax-exemption deal with the IRS, the one that’s currently under fire in a California court because Scientologists get religious tax breaks that most devout people can only dream of. Rathbun knows more about where Scientology’s bodies are buried than virtually any man alive. If Rathbun should go to the Feds, Miscavige will be spending the rest of his short, miserable life (as short and as miserable as he is) in a federal penitentary. Supposedly, Miscavige has a fear of being ass-raped in prison. He needs to confront those fears as soon as possible.

Guess what, though? Rathbun’s not talking to the Feds. He supposedly left the Church more than a year and a half ago (in fact, it was rumoured that he was actually dead), but he still quotes L. Ron Hubbard in his press pieces. And he’s doing it in a serious fashion. No one does that other than a Scientologist. And look where Rathbun is placed: Texas, chock-full of yummy electoral votes. If Obama should take Texas, he owes Rathbun, big-time. Until Rathbun speaks out against the Church, I’m going to assume that he’s still in and that Obama’s debt chit will be express-mailed to Scientology’s armed compound in Hemet, California, where Miscavige spends his time physically and psychologically abusing formerly-high-ranking Scientologists who’ve somehow pissed him off in a fashion that makes Tony Montana look like Mother Teresa.

Do you want a president who would be in debt to Scientology? No, I wouldn’t either.

A lot of people have been wondering what it would take for me to vote for McCain. Well, I can be bought. Another government job (gee, FDA, my application is in; you could have called me instead of playing around with tomatoes), free medication for life, hot and cold running sex. The usual, in other words. Or Obama can continue going the way he has been. By November, he might have pissed me off enough that I would actually commit an act which I put on par with public bestiality: voting Republican.

Last 5 posts by Eric Szulczewski

• More Pearls Before Swine - January 4th, 2009
• He's A Crook, But He's Our Crook - December 25th, 2008
• Vengeance Is Mine, Sayeth The Demo - November 4th, 2008
• Surrender is an Option - September 5th, 2008
• Unlike Grut, I Will Spoil It For You... - July 21st, 2007