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Politics & Prejudices

Saving Detroit

Drastic measures are necessary right now

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It's perfectly clear Detroit is headed for the wall, probably in a very few weeks at most. So let's start trying to solve the puzzle now.

Republican delusion: Since the election, GOP interest groups have been deluging their followers with analyses of why they lost, most of which are hopelessly delusional. Some don't even have their facts straight. Rick Santorum, for example, had a piece in the Free Press last week claiming if Mitt "Romney had received the number of votes John McCain did, he might have won."

Another common GOP claim is that President Obama won by the smallest margin of any incumbent in history. Well, morons, guess what. Both are dead wrong. Romney got more votes than McCain.

And as the final numbers are being tallied, the election turns out to have been not very close at all. Though Santorum was once a U.S. senator, he evidently doesn't know that so many people vote by absentee and mail-in ballots these days that, a day after the election, more than 10 million votes remained to be counted.

Most of these, by the way, are Democratic. Even now there may be 2 million to 3 million uncounted votes, most of them in heavily Democratic New York and California. But at this point the tally stands: Obama 64,430,588; Romney 60,221,746.

That's a margin of well more than 4 million votes, or 50.8 percent to 47.5 percent — higher than Bush's 2004 reelection margin, which he claimed gave him a "mandate."

The electoral vote was a 332-206 blowout. Democrats also wiped out Republicans in U.S. Senate races, 25 seats to 8. True, Republicans, thanks to gerrymandering, kept control of the U.S. House of Representatives. But even there they lost eight seats, and more total votes were cast for Democratic candidates.

It's very clear America knew what Romney and Co. were selling, and didn't want it. Incidentally, President Obama is the first Democrat since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win a majority of the popular vote twice. Not bad for a Kenyan Socialist Muslim. 

 

Jack Lessenberry opines weekly for Metro Times. Send comments to letters@metrotimes.com.

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