Last Minute Canvassing -- Bless our Volunteers!

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Our little corner of Pennsylvania is in a frenzy of desperate canvassing by Democrats.

Our Democrat state representative has vehemently opposed fracking by the Gas Industry, and a lobbyist for the latter is reported to have accosted him and told him he was "Going down."

I have no idea what is going on on Television, but there are billboards springing up everywhere, handbills being placed in every mailbox, full of disinformation about what the Democrats have done, and are doing.  Our representative, they say, opposed a 1% tax on the frackers.  (He, with his fellow Democrats, were holding out for a better deal.)  He has supported, they say, the use of State revenues from fracking being used for housing and road repairs in the big cities, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh.  (He opposed spending fracking revenues only in fracking counties, which could have encouraged those counties to support fracking without considering the costs, simply out of greed for the money.)

Democrat activists are anxious to get every vote in Pennsylvania and Ohio, which have been identified as swing states.  But the conservatives are hardened here, and unlikely to listen to reason.  Rural conservatives are what they are for emotional reasons.  Democrats represent the march of progress, the deterioration of the old way of life, and rural conservatives prefer the Republican ticket simply because it appears to promise a return to the glory days.  How can this be combated?

First of all, when a Democrat, canvassing door-to-door asks why the resident favors the Republican ticket, they are unlikely to be told the real reasons; perhaps the residents are not even aware of the real reasons.  It emerges in vague statements such as that they hate the fact that Obama "favors gay marriage."  (They mean: they wish things would go back to the way they were, before they knew there were so many gays around!)  They hate the fact that Obama is "Against coal!  I used to work on the railway, and if coal goes, the railway goes!"  (He means: he doesn't want to be reminded that coal has such a bad reputation.  Obama and the Democrats are probably far more in favor of the Railway System, which uses Diesel almost exclusively, than the Republicans will ever be.  Or perhaps they are under the impression that only the coalmines use railways for transportation.  That is, most certainly, not the best argument for keeping low-tech, polluting coal-burning power plants going.  Coal mine owners and coal-burning power-plant operators don't want anything to get in the way of sucking up any remaining profits in the coal business, before they try to sneak off without helping to make the abandoned mines safe.  Coal-burning plants abroad are far less polluting.  Why?  Because they are subsidized by the government.  Why not in the USA?  You tell me.)

You can't argue with people who won't state the true reasons for their beliefs.  What you can try to do is attempt to combat some of the misinformation being spread by overeager Republican activists, which amount to lies.  But hardened Republicans turn sly when the lies are brought up: Democrats, they're likely to say, are lying too.  Generally speaking, Democrats have not even begun to lie yet, and one hopes they will not start now.

As emerged in the second debate, Obama and the Democrats are not only focused on the immediate problems, such as unemployment and the real estate crisis, they're also working on long-term issues: Social Security, Health Care, Energy, the Environment, where the results will come long after Obama's term is over.  The Republicans, in contrast, say what they have to say: All we care about is to solve the unemployment problem, and remove the obstacles to (your) affluence.  But they too are interested in long-term goals, some of which are far less idealistic: the long-term health of the business class (at any cost), the steady weakening of their political opposition, and the weakening of opposition to American business abroad.  Many of these positions are not well thought out; they're childish whims encouraged by irresponsible political leaders and mindless neoconservatives who depend more on so-called Rules of Thumb and prejudice than careful reasoning: a belief that a strong military will bring in its wake a strong economy, for instance.

[Added later:

Bill Maher reminds us that under Pres Obama we have none of the circus we had under "Dubya" : the moronic Attorneys General, the Maniacal Secretaries of State, the fooling around with the Ten Commandments in State houses, the Shiavo fiascos, the stem cell research, the bans on use of the words Global Warming.  If the Romneymobile rolls into Washington, Maher warns, there will be a whole busload of lunatics, the fringe supporters of the Republicans and Romney, who will want to play because they paid.