Election and then What

MORALITY AND THE LAW CLXI
By Stephen Ellis

ELECTION…THEN WHAT

To all my dear readers: My last blog will be published for AOL on October 31, 2008. If you would like to continue to read it, it is now available at
http://www.moralityandthelawakanobodyaskedme.blogspot.com/.

To those of you (like myself) who have a fascination with the paranormal, my new blog can be read at http://www.explaininglifesmysteries.blogspot.com/.

Nobody asked me, but…

The time has finally come for all the rhetoric to stop and for everyone to go into the voting booth and vote their own conscience in the manner of their choice. No one will ever know how you voted…except yourself. What you tell people may or may not be the truth…but if you were true to yourself and to your thoughts, you need not apologize to anyone.

Although the polls strongly favor Obama, we won’t really know if the polls were accurate until Tuesday night. Despite all the last minute campaigning, in my opinion, the vote will be a landslide in favor of Obama. It’s not that I favor Obama over McCain; either one will be a vast improvement over George W. Bush. The reason I predict an Obama landslide is that I feel most of the country is composed of thinking people. And, people who “think” recognize that George W. Bush was probably the worst president in American history.

Since Bush was a Republican, I believe that most people will vote as a protest against the Republican Party. I believe Republican candidates will be protest-voted “out” and there will be a Democratic landslide.

If my prediction is accurate, it will demand a change to the way things are done in Washington:

When one party has a landslide victory, the elected candidates usually assume the voting was “for” them and not a vote “against” the last eight years. The elected politicians, somehow, usually twist the results around into believing that they, personally, have been mandated by the public to represent them. They immediately start to think they can do no wrong and callously start ”repaying” their large campaign contributors with non-competitive government contracts and favoritism. Big, big mistake! If Obama allows this to happen, he will be a one-term president.

The USA today is very much like the time Franklin Roosevelt was elected president. The nation’s economy was in complete turmoil, and he was swept to victory by an anti-Hoover sentiment.

Whoever wins is going to have to change a lot of things. In every other nation in the world (except a few dictatorships) the elected officials listen to and follow the demands and needs of the voters. In America, historically, our government listens only to the lobbyists and major financial corporations. American people have come to view their government as the “enemy”. And this has to stop.

People run for political office because of the power that office gives them. People cow-tow to their elected officials and it doesn’t take much for the elected officials to assume they are “above” the rest of the population. This, too, has to stop.

A democracy only works when those elected to office use that office for the benefit of the people…not for the benefit of themselves.

There are lots of reforms needed in Washington, and I sincerely hope and pray that if there is a Democratic landslide (as I predict), that Obama will use his office to end the power-grabbing and pork-barreling so common in Washington and so offensive to taxpayers. He will be inheriting the worst economic turmoil in 75 years, and the only way he will restore this nation to its position as a world leader is to stop the “business as usual” in Washington.

I am not a socialist and in fact I am anti-socialism. But we are going to have to put some socialistic regulations into effect, even if only on a temporary basis, to stop the greed and pillaging of our Wall Street Firms, our oil companies, our insurance companies and our Congress. The success of a capitalistic society is dependent on the honesty and integrity of those people in charge of major corporations. We haven’t seen any of that honesty and integrity for a lot of years.

As I said, nobody asked me.