What to do about votes a candidate doesn't want Signals
By John McKinney
July 02, 2008 | 03:21 PM Is American politics cynical? Yes, and never more so than when the presidency is at stake. You might think candidates would want every vote they can get. But that's only partly true. Sen. Barack Obama, who, as Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity keep reminding us, has a Muslim middle name, has stayed far away from American Muslims in his campaigning. In his heart he'd like every Muslim in America to vote for him (as well as everybody of any other religion, or of none at all), but in practice he'd prefer to pretend they don't exist. Recently two women in Muslim dress who were seated behind Obama at a rally in Detroit were asked to move out of the camera's view. And last December, when Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota, America's first elected Muslim congressman, offered to campaign for Obama he was told no thanks. As of this writing Obama has yet to appear at a Muslim mosque, despite repeated invitations. Sen. John McCain has spoken numerous times at mosques. No matter how he appears to shun their support, American Muslims are certain to vote heavily for Obama in November. I am reminded of the old story about a pair of feuding hillbillies, in the distant days when the American South was the Solid South for the Democratic party. For reasons they probably couldn't even remember, their two families had a bitter, generations-long feud, like the Hatfields and the McCoys. One man has received the Democratic nomination to run for county sheriff, and walks up to his old antagonist's house to tell him, "I don't want you nor none of your no-good kinfolk voting for me." His outraged enemy spits on the ground and replies, "Oh yeah? Well, I hate your guts, but no power on earth is gonna stop me and my kinfolk from voting the straight Democratic ticket." Modern political parties wish they could engender that brand of voter loyalty. Sen. McCain has made national security the No. 1 issue of his campaign. Last week one of his top advisors, Charlie Black, said another terrorist attack on United States soil would give the McCain campaign a big advantage, and then had to spend days backtracking and apologizing. The utterance was distasteful, but nearly everybody knew it was true. McCain quickly distanced himself from the remark. The Obama campaign reacted by calling it "a complete disgrace," and said this was exactly the kind of politics that needs to change. Change has been the Obama campaign's mantra. In the primaries the lure of change proved appealing enough to knock off Sen. Hillary Clinton and the perception she represented old guard politics. But what will actually happen if Obama is elected, and goes before a Congress that belongs to the Democrats? Will a Democratic Congress embrace change or, very much more likely, tell the new president they like things just the way they are? Political campaigns call for inventive strategies. In 1959, when Suffolk County was as solidly Republican as the American South had ever been solidly Democratic, a Democrat named Otis Pike got himself elected to Congress in a huge upset. One of the tools he employed was formation of a committee called Republicans for Pike. Whether the committee actually had many real Republicans behind it was open to question, but the scheme worked. Pike used the same committee to get himself re-elected eight straight times in a county that still belonged body and soul to the GOP. Co-opting the opposition is a technique that can work like magic. With McCain seeming to trail Obama in the polls at present, maybe what the senator from Arizona needs is a committee called Muslims for McCain. Sen. Obama doesn't seem to want them.