Gut Check

How ya doin', Dems? Acid reflux churning up in the back of your throat? Election Day is just twenty days away. Polls continue to show that the chickens may at last be coming home to roost for Republican incumbents who ruled like kings and tried to score cheap political points through lies, fear-mongering, and irresponsible tax-cutting. Looks like Senator "Man on Dog" Rick Santorum is going down big in Pennsylvania. He's down by at least five points in every recent poll. Moose woke up this morning to a headline in the Washington Post declaring that "Elections May Leave Bush an Early Lame Duck." She smiled at me before she even took her first sip of coffee and said, "Rox, it's going to be a great day." And Moose is not a morning person. The story was full of such delectable details as, "On desks around the West Wing sit digital clocks counting down the days and hours left in the Bush presidency, reminders to the White House staff to use the time left as effectively as possible." The funny thing is we have one of those clocks in our house, too! We use it to count the days to the end of one of the most destructive presidencies in American history. We also have a bumper sticker on the fridge that says "01.20.09--Bush's Last Day." Maybe we should send a carton or two of those down to the White House for Josh Bolten to pass out to all those clock-watching staffers.

Don't worry, kids, we are not getting over-confident here at Roxie's World. Goose is still convinced the Republicans will find a way to steal the election if they can't manage to win it. Moose is still a little uneasy about the senate race in Maryland, though she was pleased to see that puppy-loving Republican Michael Steele is so desperate to garner votes in the African-American community that he accused Rep. Steny Hoyer of being a racist for saying that Steele "had a career of slavishly supporting the Republican party." I am not making this up, folks. Read about it here. Steele would love to spin this into some kind of "macaca" moment, and Democrats, in their usual obliging way, have already played into that by sending Hoyer out to offer a dutiful apology, but give me a break. Steele's opponent didn't make the allegedly racially insensitive remark, and it's also perfectly obvious in any case that Hoyer intended the secondary meaning of "slavish" (showing no originality; blindly imitative). And, yes, my moms the English professors have taught me all about how intended meanings might not matter as much as the unintended or implied ones, particularly in communicative contexts charged by racial difference. Still, Michael Steele has consistently toed the Republican party line, and this latest manufactured outrage fits into his pattern of trying to position himself as a racial victim in an effort to make himself in effect "more black"--perhaps to distract voters from his class privilege and the ways in which he has benefited from his connections to (mostly white and often insidiously racist) Republicans.

Oops. Did I just rant? Dogs don't rant, do they? Well, maybe a rant is the rhetorical equivalent of sinking one's teeth into a nice juicy bone, so I guess it's okay.

Anyway, rest assured we are not taking anything for granted here at Roxie's World. I know a lot of my devoted fans live in Maryland, where voting on primary day was an absolute chaos, thanks to massive confusion about how to operate the state's new Diebold touch-screen, no-paper-trail machines. For those of you who are worried about the chaos and the uncertainty of the new system, here is where you go to apply for an absentee ballot. You don't need to have a reason to vote absentee, but you do need to apply for a ballot by October 31.

Moose has taken to feeding her election obsession by cruising for polls on a daily (nightly, hourly) basis. Here are some of her favorites:

• Electoral Vote
• Real Clear Politics
• Rasmussen Reports
  

Rasmussen is a polling company, but a lot of information is available for free on the site. Electoral Vote was set up in 2004 to track electoral votes state by state. The guy who runs it owns up to being a Democrat, but he's also a smart statistician and he only tracks non-partisan polls. Real Clear Politics offers averages of major polls. It's a very deep site that also has a blog and pulls together news and political commentary from all sides.

Happy surfing, kids. Keep the Maalox at hand and the champagne on ice. Fight the good fight, and then, dammit, have a party!