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Letter from a Former Dem. Speech Writer

• Oct 26, 2008 Posted by Karen Erb
  Here's a letter from William J. Connell, top aide to Hubert Humphrey for twenty plus years, to his daughter, a dear friend of mine.
   
  

  I have been a bit obsessed about this election, shall we say?  But with good reason.

   

  I believe it much the most important election since 1932 when the Democrats came in at the very bottom of the Great Depression, to sweep away the old economic and political order and make fundamental changes in the way we govern and specifically the way we treat our downtrodden, our young, our sick and our old, and, indeed, our entire working class, to re-set the nation's priorities, and to resume the great quest for equal justice and opportunity for all and not just for the tiny moneyed class. 

   

  We have nearly come full circle since I was a small boy who looked down from the second story of a Balboa Park building in San Diego and watched the great FDR sitting jauntily in the back of a big convertible riding right down the boulevard below me.

   

  Deja vu! 

   

  Here we have seen once again the same catastrophic failure of the wealthy and privileged who had run the country into ruin with their greed and profligacy, and again we are fortunate (some would say blessed) that at just the right time a leader has emerged from nowhere -- something that no one two years ago could ever have conceived of -- a young, vigorous and good-hearted man with the will and the eloquence and intellect, and above all both common sense and broad vision, to lead this nation back out of the shambles that the great corporations and financiers and the Republican puppets they put into office have made of this country.

   

  What a challenge! What an opportunity to set this great ship back on course and get it moving again, to again make government the servant of the broad mass of our people, and not the instrument of the super-rich to create and entrench a permanent oligarchy.

   

  Hubert Humphrey would have loved to see this.
  
  

  I believe that nothing will change in the next 12 days, and that Obama will have a great victory, very possibly carrying in with him a filibuster-proof Senate and the means to break the Congressional gridlock.

   

  I am shortly going to send around a little chart of the poll closing times on election night, with the entire layout of what is the probable course of election night -- that is the capture by Obama before five p.m. Pacific ST of the first "Red" state that will tell us that he has won the night -- which could be any of four states that report early: Virginia or Ohio or North Carolina or Florida, while the only Kerry 2004 state that McCain has chosen to concentrate on to try to take away from Obama, Pennsylvania, will be reporting at the same time that it is again going solidly Democratic.

   

  At this point, Obama holds a strong lead in all the Kerry 2004 states, with 252 electoral votes, and also holds such a commanding lead in Iowa (which Bush carried) that we can also count on Iowa's 7 votes and know that Obama is therefore just 10 votes short of the 269 electoral college votes that would put the election into the Democratically-controlled House of Representatives to decide. 

   

  I think the odds are that he will carry all four of those states, but the first to be declared an Obama win -- coupled with an Obama win in Pennsylvania -- will tell us that Obama has, indeed, won the Presidency.  Everything after that is going to be frosting on the cake, and it is just a question of how big a lead he runs up, how long his coattails are for the House and Senate races, and how strong the mandate the American people will have given him.

   

  If all the polls are wrong, and there is some kind of hidden anti-Black vote there outside of the bigoted stronghold of Appalachia, and Obama does not carry even one of those four critical Eastern states, then we would be in for a long evening while we wait for Indiana, Missouri, Colorado, New Mexico, maybe even Montana and North Dakota to come in, to find the last 10 votes needed to elect Obama.

   

  That is the worst case.  I think it is 10 to 1 that Obama will put it away in the first couple of hours after the first of those four critical states closes its polling places.

   

  One of the last pieces of the jigsaw puzzle of this election campaign, and perhaps the most important speeches he will ever make in is life, will be Obama's half-hour prime-time national address on all networks just four days, I think, before the election.  There he will put the fire once again into the younger voters they have so brilliantly drawn in to register in those critical states -- and overcome any "Bradley effect" that may linger in elderly Democrats and independents by pouring into the polling places to actually vote. 

   

  Not long to wait, now.

   

  Love, Dad
  
  
  

  
  
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