Mike's Election Guide (9 page)
Obama should be making a speech about gender like the brilliant one he gave on race back in March. Millions of people, especially women, had high hopes for the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Attention must be paid. And you don’t pay attention to it by having your advisors run your wife through the makeover machine, trying to soften her up and pipe her down. Michelle Obama has been one of the most refreshing things about this election year. But within weeks of the end of the primary season, the handlers stepped in to deal with the “Michelle Problem.”
What
problem? She speaks her mind? She wears what she wants? She thought he was crazy to run for president and tried to put her foot down? Only a
crazy
person would want her husband and family to be chewed up and ground through the political grist mill.
Michelle’s biggest sin, according to the punditocracy, was to say that, as a black woman, this may be the first time in her adult life she’s been really proud of her country. Shock! Surprise! Outrage! But not from any of the black women
I
know. You have to be white and stupid to not know what she was really saying. If you don’t understand, let me ask you this: Have you been proud of what this country has been doing in the past few years? Are you proud your neighbors had their house taken from them? Are you proud to be sending a good chunk of your paycheck to the oil companies so they can post record profits? Are you proud to know your vice president outed one of our spies and put her life and the lives of others at risk? If not, well you’re no better than Michelle Obama. That’s all she was saying—what we are all feeling.
Barack Obama, outnumbered in his household 3-1 by the female gender, has a lot at stake in making sure that women’s rights and opportunities are on par with men’s. As one who knows what it’s like to be in a class of people who traditionally have not held power, he’s in an excellent position to speak to another group that has been left out—women—and assure them that he will be their advocate.
Plus, this is just good politics. Women vote by a larger margin than men. And if it remains true that Obama will not carry the white male vote (as most of the polls indicate he will not), then he simply cannot win without capturing a strong majority of the female vote. Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton both lost the white male vote but won the White House. They did so by winning an overwhelming percentage of the black, Hispanic, and female vote. That HAS to be Obama’s strategy to win. Otherwise, Cindy McCain will be our new First Lady.
5. Show up to a gunfight with a peashooter.
Convince yourself that the Republicans are just going to roll over and play dead because there is simply no life left in their Party. Convince yourself
this one is in the bag!
Convince yourself that if you play by the rules, the Republicans will, too.
And when McCain and his people roll out their nuclear arsenal on you, just go all sweet and sensitive and logical. Believe that the truth shall prevail, that good people will see what the Republicans are up to. As they smear you, your family, your religious beliefs—cower, back down, go on the defensive.
If they say you should quit your church, quit your church! If they explode over your speaking the truth about the anger and despair of the white working class, take it all back! Heck, if they don’t like your new I’m-running-for-president logo, denounce it, apologize for it, and fire the person who designed it.
But don’t stop there. Be ready to jump and change
anything
at a moment’s notice. If they tell you to pull your kids out of
that school
, do it. If they tell you to change your toothpaste, don’t question it. And if they ask you to stand on your head and do the hokey-pokey, snap to it and do it with a smile on your face and don’t forget to apologize for not doing the hokey-pokey earlier, you meant no disrespect and please don’t take it as any indication that you do not love your country, your flag, and your Christian God.
Do all of that, and then listen for that sound—the sound of your supporters shuffling away in silence. Don’t worry, though—they won’t vote for McCain. They’ll just stop showing up at the campaign headquarters over on Maple Street. They’ll say they’re too busy to go on another three-hour door-to-door literature drop. They’ll still take a list of a hundred voters home to call and read the index card over the phone about “why you should vote for Obama”—but there won’t be much enthusiasm in their voice, and the voter on the other end of the line will hear that. After 15 or 20 calls, they’ll give up—after all, there’s dishes to do and a dog to walk. And on election day, they’ll go do their duty and vote, but they will not be up at 6am driving around the city’s neighborhoods picking up strangers who need a ride to the polls.
And some of them, well, they’ve seen it all before, one Democratic loser after another. One more dashed hope, one more realization that the war won’t really end and life will continue to just get harder. On the way to the polls, they might just come to a stop light and, after 10 seconds or so of all of this welling up in their head, they might just say, who needs this, turn around and go home. Maybe they’ll pick up a six pack on the way. Maybe there’s a new episode of
Deal or No Deal
on tonight. That would be nice. The girls are pretty, especially the blonde in the third row. Wait, they’re all blonde. No, not that one—THAT one! Oh yes, I see her. She
is
pretty. But the Man in the Booth has picked up the phone! He’s calling down to you. Deal? Or no deal? No deal! No deal! Don’t do it! Hey, I’m outta beer! Why didn’t I pick up a case? Now I gotta spend 8 bucks on gas to go buy more beer! Aaaaarrrggggghhhhhh!!!! HOWIE MANDEL ISN’T WEARING A FLAG PIN!! U-S-A! U-S-A!
6. Denounce me!
The candidate Obama, at some point, might be asked this question: “Michael Moore is a supporter of yours and has endorsed you. But in his new book,
Mike’s Election Guide,
he says the following (go ahead and fill in the blank—I’ve provided a full list of outrageously offensive lines
already taken out of context
in advance to make it easy for right-wing commentators, Fox News, and Dr. Sanjay Gupta). Will you still accept his endorsement or do you denounce him?”
And he better denounce me or they will tear him to shreds. He had better back away not only from me but from anyone and everyone who veers a bit too far to the left of where his advisors have told him is the sweet spot for all those red state voters. I won’t care and I won’t take it personally. After all, I’m not the guy who married him or baptized his kids. I’m just the idiot who went to the same terrorist Muslim school of flag pin desecrators he went to.
I remember poor John Kerry not even being able to admit, when asked by Larry King, if he had seen
Fahrenheit 9/11.
“No,” he said, “I haven’t. . . . I don’t plan to, right now.”
But he had indeed seen it
. I sat there watching him say this and I just felt sorry for him and for the election he was about to lose.
Months later, as I toured the country in my own independent effort to get him elected, we both arrived in Albuquerque the same day, each of us holding a separate rally. One of us had 7,500 people show up in the University of New Mexico basketball arena; the other had 800 come to an airport hangar. All I remember is feeling really bad about it. It did not feel good that we knew he was going to lose.
So Barack, by denouncing me, you can help McCain get elected. Because when you denounce me, it’s not really me you’re distancing yourself from—it’s the millions upon millions of people who I agree with and who feel the same way about things as I do. And many of them are the kind of crazy voters who have no problem voting for a Nader just to prove a point. Elections have been lost by just 537 votes. I don’t want that to happen to you.
We can’t take four more years of this madness. We need you to be a candidate who will fight back every time they attack you. Actually, don’t even wait ’til you have to fight back. Fight first! Show some vision and courage and smoke
them
out. Take the offensive. Keep asking why these lobbyists are McCain’s best friends. Let’s finally have a Democrat who’s got the balls to fire first.
Or tell the press you’ve had the boys from Chicago “remove Michael Moore to an undisclosed location, and that will be the last you hear from Mr. Moore until after the election.”
Ten Presidential Decrees for His First Ten Days
Mr. Obama, here are ten good ideas you can announce once you are inaugurated, one for each of your first ten days in office.
1. Bring Back the Draft.
We all know that the U.S. occupation and war in Iraq would have been over a long time ago if there were a draft. The streets would have been full of protestors every single week. Imagine the reaction on college campuses if students were suddenly being drafted and dumped into the boot camps of the United States Army. Whoa! If you think those Obama rallies have been huge, just try sending all those young people to Tikrit.
Of course it would never would have got to that point because their parents are opposed to this war (that’s 63 percent of the country) and would never have allowed their children to be shipped off to die for W.
But . . . if it’s
someone else’s
kids doing the dying (as it is in this war), well then, the streets are quiet, the electorate subdued.
The new president needs to bring back the draft. But with a twist:
Draft only the 18-to-26-year-old children of the richest people in America—those whose earnings put them in the top 5 percent of income earners.
That’s right. Draft the rich.
There is no better way to know if a war is truly necessary than to see if the wealthy are willing to sacrifice THEIR OWN OFFSPRING. And the day they are, we
all
better sign up ’cause that can only mean some scary shit is coming our way!
Do you think we would invade a country that posed no threat to us if the rich kids had to die? How many more of these needless wars do you think we’d have if there was an assembly line of bodies from our upscale suburban and private schools right into the military?
What’s the one thing we know about the rich and their kids? They like to live! They like to live because life is
good!
The only time they would even give the slightest thought to risking their precious platinum-plated lives is if someone was at the door threatening to kill them and take all their stuff. If there were no servants around to fend off the attackers, no safe room to hide in, then I think I can actually see them using whatever means they had available to stop the intruders.
Like they did in World War II. Rich people such as Joe Kennedy, Jr., famous athletes like Ted Williams, and numerous movie stars, including Jimmy Stewart and Henry Fonda, joined up to serve. Even the President sent his sons off to war to defend the country. They perceived Hitler and Tojo to be a real threat to their existence. So everyone—including and
especially
the rich—joined in the war effort to defeat the fascists and the aggressors.
Therefore I can assure you that, back in 2003, had the rich thought there was even the
slightest
chance they would never see Aspen again, they would have had their sons right there on the front lines with the kids from Detroit and South Central and Appalachia. Bush would have sent his daughters off to do their duty, as would’ve the pro-war senators Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, each of whom had daughters of draft age at the time.
But, strangely, none of them went. Of course they didn’t! They knew the war was a ruse, that no real threat existed and that there was no need to sacrifice their children. Only one senator voted to send his enlisted son off to war, and he was a Democrat (Tim Johnson of South Dakota).
But would we be able to front a full military with just the offspring of the well-heeled? I did the math to find out exactly how many rich kids, 18 to 26, we have in this country. Our current military has 1,372,905 enlistees. And guess what?
There are 1,305,675 wealthy offspring of draft age in the U.S.!
So we would have virtually the same size armed forces using
just rich kids!
Think about it. Who would be more incentivized to go out there and defend America than the youth who will benefit the most from it! And you can bet daddy’s little rich girl isn’t going to be driving around Fallujah in some tin can Humvee. That vehicle is going to be made of solid titanium forged from Grandpappy’s Brazilian mines. There will be no line out the door at the V.A. hospital when the sons of CEOs come home with no legs. They’ll have private rooms with catered meals and beautiful nurses.
We need to start drafting the people who will make sure we never have to go to war.
2. Anyone Who Tries to Make a Profit From Healthcare Will Be Arrested.
Being able to see a doctor when you’re sick should be a human right. It’s a life and death issue, the same as if your house was on fire or you were a victim of a crime. And just like our free and universal fire and police protection that is afforded to every citizen, health insurance should be provided FREE OF CHARGE TO EVERYONE.
And it is—by every other civilized government on earth except ours.
This is a matter of national security. An unhealthy nation full of overweight, diabetic weaklings who are so sugared up they have no idea where the front door is so they can go out and run around and get some fresh air,
has no way of defending itself!
There must be, in the United States, a universal healthcare system that is run by one government agency (like Social Security) and is nonprofit. It must cover everyone who lives here, no exceptions. It must contain a heavy focus on prevention. Dental and mental must be treated the same as medical.
Private profit-making insurance companies and profit-making hospital chains should not be allowed to exist in this system. No American should be denied medical services because a company doesn’t see a profit in it, and likewise no corporation should be able to gain from others’ illnesses.